Federico Zandomeneghi

Federico Zandomeneghi came from a Venetian family that worked in stone. His father and grandfather were both neoclassical sculptors, and the trade was waiting for him, but he chose paint instead, and in 1874 he left Italy for Paris and never really came back.

He arrived just as a group of French painters was being mocked for a new, loose way of working, and he fit right in. Zandomeneghi showed in four of the Impressionist exhibitions, and at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes near Place Pigalle he fell into the circle around Edgar Degas, the older painter of dancers and racecourses, who took to calling him "Zando". Like Degas he mostly painted women, caught in quiet domestic moments, though his touch ran softer and warmer.

In the 1890s he turned to pastel and grew expert with it. Around then the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel began showing his work in the United States, and Zandomeneghi lived on that modest success in Paris until his death in 1917.