Giuseppe Amisani

Giuseppe Amisani failed the technical-drawing course at his school in Pavia, in Lombardy in northern Italy, which is a strange line in the record of a man who became one of Italy's most sought-after portrait painters. He moved on to the Brera academy in Milan and studied under Cesare Tallone, a portraitist known for catching a likeness quickly, and by 1908 he had won the academy's Mylius prize and stepped straight into fashionable Milanese life.

This was the Belle Époque, the confident years before the First World War, and Amisani became one of its favourite brushes, elegant, fresh in colour, quick to flatter a sitter honestly. He painted the stage star Lyda Borelli and a stream of wealthy clients, then carried his reputation abroad, spending years in Argentina and Brazil.

In 1924 he was invited to Egypt to decorate the royal palace at Ras al-Tin for King Fuad, and while there painted the boy who would grow up to be King Farouk. He died in 1941 at Portofino, the small harbour town on the Ligurian coast that painters had long made their own.