Portrait of Benedetto Junck

Benedetto Junck was about 22 when Cremona painted him, around 1874. He had been born in Turin to an Italian mother and an Alsatian father, trained for a career in business and worked for a while in Paris, then gave it up for music and came to Milan to study composition. His house there soon became a meeting place for the painters and writers of the Scapigliatura, the city's bohemian avant-garde. Cremona shows him at three-quarter length, hair tousled, looking straight at us, one hand resting on a sheet of music, and signed the canvas with his initials, TC, at the upper left. Junck went on to write mostly chamber music and songs, and he died in 1903. In 1920, as he had wished, the portrait came to Turin's civic collections, together with a charcoal drawing by his brother Enrico, who was also a painter.