Portrait of Mrs Olimpia Oytana Barucchi

This is a full-scale society portrait from 1896, a canvas close to two metres tall, painted at a moment when commissions of this kind filled Giacomo Grosso's studio in Turin. The gallery names the sitter as Signora Olimpia Oytana Barucchi. Some published lists of Grosso's works give the same picture another name, Signora Erminia Sacco-Oytana, so even the identity of the woman on the red sofa has not stayed fixed. In the same year Grosso painted the actress Virginia Reiter on an even larger canvas, and that portrait belongs to the Turin gallery as well.