Born: 1881 Naples, Italy
Died: 1963 London, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1901
Biography
Illustrator Fortunino Matania was born in Naples, Italy in 1881. Encouraged by his father, renowned artist Eduardo Matania (1847–1929), he began to draw and paint from a young age and inspired by the classical era, sketched numerous scenes of everyday life based on the excavations at Pompeii. He exhibited his first work at the Naples Academy, aged only eleven, and as an adolescent assisted his father with illustrations for the weekly publication L’Illustrazione Italiana.
In 1901 Matania began working in Paris for the newspaper Illustration Francaise and the following year, accepted an invitation to London to illustrate the coronation of King Edward VII for The Graphic. No sketchbooks or pencils were allowed inside Westminster Abbey but Matania was able to reconstruct the entire occasion, owing to his photographic memory and sketches he had made on the spot. Impressed with his work, Edward VII later invited Matania to cover his tour of India in 1904 (and Matania continued to receive commissions to cover all marriages, christenings, coronations, and funerals within the British Royal Family until 1953). In 1904 Matania joined the staff of popular publication The Sphere, to which he contributed his most famous illustrations including the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he was commissioned by the British Government as an Official War Artist and produced several hundred pictures of soldiers in Belgium, France, Italy and Turkey; executed with extraordinary finish and detail, they were well received. He combined an instinct for composition and staging (based on years of studying the old masters) with a relaxed truthfulness to nature and a vivid sense of action. His early work was based on eyewitness accounts, often related to him by injured soldiers at home on leave. He also used his influence to get sent to the French Front, on one occasion narrowly escaping with his life when a shell landed within five yards of where he was at work on a painting of the aftermath of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915. He later built a reconstruction trench in his garden at Potters Bar in Hertfordshire and was supplied with military equipment by the War Office to ensure that every technical detail was correct, subsequently, receiving many congratulatory letters from soldiers, impressed by his extraordinary realism. His most celebrated painting, Goodbye Old Man, was a dramatic rendition of a British officer saying goodbye to his wounded horse, commissioned by the Blue Cross Fund (a charity established for the benefit of horses wounded in war). Matania was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Painters and Watercolours in 1917.
After the First World War, he began to concentrate almost exclusively on historical works, often focusing on mythological stories from Ancient Greece and Rome, for which he reconstructed ancient settings and costumes in his large studio at 104 Priory Road. For A Gift from Caesar. A Vision of Imperial Rome, exhibited at the Royal Institute in 1926, he modelled each object on an actual museum piece, although he also supplied any gaps from his own imagination, remarking that he sometimes saw a Roman scene with such clarity that he thought himself an ancient Roman: 'In a scene, there are often voids to fill in the costumes and other details, but if you delve into the atmosphere of a bygone era, then you can create a piece which you won't be able to find in any museum, and yet be sure that it really existed’. He also collaborated with some of the best-known filmmakers of the era including Cecil B. DeMille, for whom he created scenes of ancient Rome and Egypt for The Ten Commandments in 1923, and Alfred Hitchcock, working on the special effects for The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1934 (in one scene painting a crowd scene directly over a photograph). When the British women's magazine Britannia and Eve was launched in 1929, he became their regular artist for the next nineteen years. He also commissioned a number of books including Six Stories from Shakespeare, retold by John Buchan, in 1934 and designed commercial posters for clients including the LNER railway, Ovaltine and Burberry. During the Second World War, although Britain was at war with Italy, Matania considered himself British. He participated in a number of Royal Academy summer exhibitions and in 1954 his paintings were shown in a joint exhibition with Margaret Dovaston and Raymond Sheppard at Foyles Art Gallery in London. Matania also wrote and illustrated his own historical stories, producing a series of paintings for the Look and Learn publisher Leonard Matthews called a Pageant of Kings. Matania died in London in 1963 at the age of 81. His work is in UK public collections including the Blue Cross, the Imperial War Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A.
Related books
- Jim Davies and Lucinda Gosling (eds.), Illustrating Armageddon: Fortunino Matania and the First World War (London: Uniform, 2019)
- Almerinda Di Benedetto, 'Images from the Front. Fortunino Matania reporter per The Sphere (1915–1920)', in Giuseppe Pignatelli and Marcello Rotili (eds.), Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum: la Memoria delle Armi (Caserta: Università degli studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, 2017), pp. 25-33
- Almerinda Di Benedetto, 'Ritratto di Signora in un Interno: Variazioni sull'Antico nelle Pittura di Fortunino Matania', in Massimo Osanna and Maria Teresa Caracciolo (eds.), Pompei e l’Europa (Milano, 2016), pp. 185-193
- Lucinda Gosling, The Art of Fortunino Matania: A Catalogue of Art and Prints (London: Book Palace Books, 2016)
- Lucinda Gosling, Drawing from History: The Forgotten Art of Fortunino Matania (London: Book Palace Books, 2016)
- Lucinda Goslind, Goodbye, Old Man: Matania's Vision of the First World War (London: The History Press, 2014)
- G. Salvatori, 'Fortunino e Ugo Matania', in Mariantonietta Picone Petrusa (ed.), in In Margine. Artisti Napoletani fra Tradizione e Opposizione 1909–1923 (Milano, 1986)
- Edward Horton and Peter Shellard, Great Stories From History. Illustrated by Fortunino Matania (London: Carousel Books, 1972)
- Percy V Bradshaw, The Art of the Illustrator: F. Matania and his Work (London: Press Art School, 1919)
Public collections
- Blue Cross Foundation
- Imperial War Museum, London
- National Portrait Gallery, London
- Railway Museum, York
- Royal Collection Trust
- Victoria and Albert Museum, London
- Wellcome Collection, London
Related organisations
- Royal Institute of Painters and Watercolours (member)
Related web links
Selected exhibitions
- Exhibition of Paintings by Fortunino Matania, Margaret Dovaston, Raymond Sheppard, Foyles Art Gallery, London (1954)
- Royal Academy: 153rd exhibition (1921), 152nd exhibition (1920), 148th exhibition (1916), 147th exhibition (1915), 146th exhibition (1914), 141st exhibition (1909) and 140th exhibition (1908)
