Pietro Pezzati
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Pietro Pezzati
Pietro Pezzati (September 18 1902 - February 19 1993) was an American portrait painter who was located in the Boston area. His art was rooted in the Renaissance tradition. His artwork included landscapes, pen and ink drawings, watercolors, pastel and oil portraits.
He was born Peter S. Pezzati to Italian immigrant parents, Sisto and Cesarina Opizzi Pezzati, at 57 Batchelder Street in the Boston suburb of Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Peter graduated from Boston College High School in 1917 where he studied both Latin and Greek. He was to eventually master six languages. He then won a scholarship to the Child-Walker School of Arts and Crafts in Boston; there he studied under American painter Charles Hopkinson, who took him on as an assistant.
In the mid-1920s he taught art at the Child-Walker School for two years, then went on a six-month traveling and painting tour of Europe, especially France and Italy, arriving back in Boston just in time to attend his sister Josephine's wedding on February 19, 1927, where he was Bruno Ferroli's best man. He continued to apprentice under Hopkinson, and worked at Hopkinson's Fenway studio.
Peter painted many eminent Bostonians and Americans such as Ralph Lowell and William L. Kenly. His paintings are hanging in institutions across the United States, including Massachusetts General Hospital, Symphony Hall, The Massachusetts Historical Society, The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Harvard University, and the Smithsonian Institution, which holds a collection of some of his papers and for which he was recorded as part of their oral history program. His portraits have also been exhibited at the Margaret Brown and Vose Galleries in Boston, at the Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C., the Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition, the 1939 World's Fair and the National Galleries in Washington.
Peter married Mary Palmer of Boston in 1943. They had two children, Pamela and Peter. He died at the age of 90 of cerebral vascular disease in Westwood, Massachusetts, where he had retired with his second wife, Dr. Madeleine Field Crawford after having lived in Needham, Massachusetts for over twenty years.
Sources
- Sisto and Cesarina Pezzati: Their Descendants, by Eric Bruno Borgman, 1995.
- Who's Who in American Art, Jacques Cattell Press, 1986, page 1292.
- The Artists Bluebook: 34,000 North American Artists to March 2005, Lonnie Pierson Dunbier, 2005, page 479.
- Index of Artists, Daniel Trowbridge Mallett, 1948, page 811.