Francesco Anelli

Francesco Anelli (1805–1878) was an Italian-American Romantic period artist. He is best known for his oil painting that depicts Julia Gardiner Tyler, the second wife of the 10th U.S. President John Tyler. Anelli's monumental masterpiece and most acclaimed painting, entitled The End of the World, has been lost.

Anelli was quite celebrated in his own time, especially for his monumental work called The End of the World. He was born in Italy and emigrated to New York City from Milan about 1835. Almost immediately Anelli attracted a good deal of attention, not for his portraits, but for his gigantic apocalyptic historical pictures, beginning with his rendering of a family group during the Deluge, which was the principal work in an exhibition of his pictures shown in rooms at the New York Athenaeum on Chambers Street at the end of 1836.

Anelli’s portrait style is distinctive—in its sharp linearity, bright lighting, and highly reflective surfaces—and appears the antithesis of the dominant romantic approach to portraiture practiced contemporaneously by Thomas Sully (1783–1872), Henry Inman (1801–1846), and Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872). Anelli’s manner corresponded to that practiced by other immigrant Italian and German painters such as Spiridione Gambardella (active 1838–39), Gherlando Marsiglia (1792–1850), and Christian Mayr (about 1805–1851), whose works are all relatively little known today. In 1839 the painter-critic John Kenrick Fisher (born 1807) distinguished these portraitists, along with Charles Cromwell Ingham (1796–1863), as the practitioners of an exceptional and distinctive style, which he denounced as “prompted and encouraged by an aberration of the public taste.”

In 1843 Anelli had on his easel Conrad and Medora (unlocated) taken from Lord Byron's Corsair, while his most acclaimed painting was the Opening of the Sixth Seal, or The End of the World (unlocated), which was shown at the Apollo Rooms at 410 Broadway in New York City in April 1844. This picture—which offered the light and promise of Christianity as humanity’s only spiritual salvation in the face of utter annihilation—displayed lurid light effects complete with dark clouds, bloody skies and lightning, and centered on a figure representing the church, or the spouse of Christ, with a crumbling temple and a bewildered and terrified multitude of sinners, both repentant and unrepentant, in a "grand catastrophe". The picture, hailed in the press as the largest painting in America—measuring 23 feet by 19 feet—was described as a masterwork and considered the “Boldest attempt at the highest effect in art, which has yet been made on this side of the Atlantic.” Anelli toured his masterwork through the northeastern United States and continued to create allegorical compositions derived from historical and biblical sources.

...
Wikipedia