Rinaldo Cuneo
Encyclopedia
Rinaldo Cuneo dubbed the Painter of San Francisco, was an American artist known for his landscape paintings and murals.
family of artists and musicians. Rinaldo was the second of Giovanni (John) Cuneo and his wife Annie's seven children. Rinaldo and his brothers Cyrus (1879–1916) and Egisto (1890–1972) all became artists. Their sisters Erminia, Clorinda, Evelina, and Clelia were more interested in music. The family lived on Telegraph Hill
in San Francisco's Italian American neighborhood of North Beach. As an adult, Rinaldo's home and studio, on a cliff with unobstructed views of the bay, was just a block from his childhood home.
Cuneo enlisted in the Navy
at age twenty, during the Spanish-American War
, and served for three years aboard the Oregon
as a gunner. He then worked at the family business, a steamship ticket agency, and began his art studies, taking night classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art under Arthur Frank Mathews
, Arthur Putnam
, and Gottardo Piazzoni
. Among his classmates were Ralph Stackpole
and Maynard Dixon
. His art education continued in London
, where he was elected to a prestigious membership in the Royal Institute of Oil Painters
, and at Académie Colarossi
in Paris
(1911–1913). His art studies in Paris under James Abbott McNeill Whistler were financed with a brief career as a boxer
.
s depicting landscapes
of the San Francisco Bay Area
and for his mural
s, Cuneo also painted cityscape
s, marine scenes
, and still life
s. His first exhibition, in 1913, was in San Francisco at the Helgesen Gallery, and his work was also shown at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition
and in virtually every subsequent major Bay Area art exhibit until his death. A reviewer wrote that Cuneo's paintings "leave a mellow glow in one's heart. They portray not merely places, but mood and atmosphere."
His early color palette reflected that of Tonalism
, with earthy, dark, neutral hues. One of his teachers, Whistler, was a leading Tonalist. Cuneo later adopted the lighter pastel palette associated with the Impressionists
. Still later in his career, he used a palette which "vibrated with low-keyed, intense colors and radiance." His painting style also evolved throughout his career, and he integrated innovations which he came across into his own style, including aspects of Tonalism, Impressionism, and Modernism
.
From 1916 to 1917 Cuneo worked for a tugboat
service while living in San Anselmo
, painting maritime scenes in his spare time. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts during the summer sessions of 1920, 1925, 1935, and 1936.
For his many exceptional paintings of the Bay Area, Cuneo was known as The Painter of San Francisco. Arthur Millier of the Los Angeles Times
wrote that Cuneo's landscapes "breathe the essential strength and poetry of his region." Another critic noted that "they are the very soul and essence of California materialized in line and color." In addition to his California landscapes, in 1928 he also painted scenes of the Arizona desert. Cuneo said that "a landscape should embrace volume, simplicity, unity, a good sense of color values, rhythm of line, and above all, light."
In 1934 Cuneo received a commission from the Public Works of Art Project
to paint two lunette
mural
s of Bay Area Hills in the foyer of Coit Tower
. A number of Cuneo's paintings were featured in the 1935 inaugural exhibition of the San Francisco Museum of Art. One of them, California Hills, was honored with the Museum's Purchase Prize award.
After a brief illness, Cuneo died in San Francisco on December 27, 1939.
Although he had been a popular artist with many well-received exhibits throughout his life, Cuneo had found himself unable to successfully market his paintings due to the economic conditions created by the Great Depression
. This led to feelings that he had failed. San Francisco Chronicle
columnist Herb Caen
wrote that the artist's wife found "more than one hundred hitherto unseen Cuneo paintings, hidden in his two studios – in corners, in trunks, under books (some even hanging turned to the wall by the artist)." Many of these paintings were subsequently displayed in solo exhibitions, in 1940 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, in 1949 at the de Young Museum, and in 1961 at San Francisco's Gallery of Fine Arts.
A critic wrote in 1991 that Cuneo "was a Cezannesque purist worth remembering".
(1933), Museum of Modern Art
(New York), San Francisco Art Association
(1916–34), Golden Gate International Exposition
(1939), California Palace of the Legion of Honor
, and the de Young Museum.
A 2009 exhibit at Museo ItaloAmericano
, Cuneo: A Family of Early California Artists, presented a retrospective of the work of Rinaldo, Cyrus and Egisto Cuneo. It was the first exhibit to display the work of the three brothers together.
His work is also in many museum collections, including Oakland Museum of California
, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, Sierra Nevada Museum (Reno), de Young Museum, Laguna Art Museum
, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
, The Huntington, and Museo ItaloAmericano
.
Early life and education
Rinaldo Cuneo was born in San Francisco on July 2, 1877, part of an Italian AmericanItalian American
An Italian American , is an American of Italian ancestry. The designation may also refer to someone possessing Italian and American dual citizenship...
family of artists and musicians. Rinaldo was the second of Giovanni (John) Cuneo and his wife Annie's seven children. Rinaldo and his brothers Cyrus (1879–1916) and Egisto (1890–1972) all became artists. Their sisters Erminia, Clorinda, Evelina, and Clelia were more interested in music. The family lived on Telegraph Hill
Telegraph Hill, San Francisco
Telegraph Hill refers to a neighborhood in San Francisco, California. It is one of San Francisco's 44 hills, and one of its original "Seven Hills."-Location:...
in San Francisco's Italian American neighborhood of North Beach. As an adult, Rinaldo's home and studio, on a cliff with unobstructed views of the bay, was just a block from his childhood home.
Cuneo enlisted in the Navy
United States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
at age twenty, during the Spanish-American War
Spanish-American War
The Spanish–American War was a conflict in 1898 between Spain and the United States, effectively the result of American intervention in the ongoing Cuban War of Independence...
, and served for three years aboard the Oregon
USS Oregon (BB-3)
USS Oregon was a pre-Dreadnought of the United States Navy. Her construction was authorized on 30 June 1890, and the contract to build her was awarded to Union Iron Works of San Francisco, California on 19 November 1890. Her keel was laid exactly one year later...
as a gunner. He then worked at the family business, a steamship ticket agency, and began his art studies, taking night classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art under Arthur Frank Mathews
Arthur Frank Mathews
Arthur F. Mathews was an American Tonalist painter who was one of the founders of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. Trained as an architect and artist, he and his wife Lucia Kleinhans Mathews had a significant effect on the evolution of Californian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...
, Arthur Putnam
Arthur Putnam
Arthur Putnam was an American sculptor from the turn of the 20th century who is recognized for his bronzes of wild animals and public monuments. He was a well-known Californian during his days in California and enjoyed a national reputation as well...
, and Gottardo Piazzoni
Gottardo Piazzoni
Gottardo Fidele Piazzoni was a Swiss-born American landscape painter, muralist and sculptor of Italian heritage, a key member of the school of Northern California artists in the early 1900s....
. Among his classmates were Ralph Stackpole
Ralph Stackpole
Ralph Ward Stackpole was an American sculptor, painter, muralist, etcher and art educator, San Francisco's leading artist during the 1920s and 1930s. Stackpole was involved in the art and causes of social realism, especially during the Great Depression, when he was part of the Federal Art Project...
and Maynard Dixon
Maynard Dixon
Maynard Dixon was a 20th-century American artist whose body of work focused on the American West. He was married for a time to American photographer Dorothea Lange.-Biography:...
. His art education continued in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, where he was elected to a prestigious membership in the Royal Institute of Oil Painters
Royal Institute of Oil Painters
The Royal Institute of Oil Painters, also known as ROI, is an association of painters in London and is the only major art society which features work done only in oil. It is a member society of the Federation of British Artists.-History:...
, and at Académie Colarossi
Académie Colarossi
The Académie Colarossi is an art school founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. First located on the Île de la Cité, it moved in the 1870s to 10 rue de la Grande-Chaumière in the VIe arrondissement of Paris, France....
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
(1911–1913). His art studies in Paris under James Abbott McNeill Whistler were financed with a brief career as a boxer
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...
.
Art
Perhaps best known for his oil paintingOil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
s depicting landscapes
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
of the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
and for his mural
Mural
A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.-History:Murals of...
s, Cuneo also painted cityscape
Cityscape
A cityscape is the urban equivalent of a landscape. Townscape is roughly synonymous with cityscape, though it implies the same difference in urban size and density implicit in the difference between the words city and town. In urban design the terms refer to the configuration of built forms and...
s, marine scenes
Marine art
Marine art or maritime art is any form of figurative art that portrays or draws its main inspiration from the sea. Maritime painting is a genre that depicts ships and the sea—a genre particularly strong from the 17th to 19th centuries...
, and still life
Still life
A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made...
s. His first exhibition, in 1913, was in San Francisco at the Helgesen Gallery, and his work was also shown at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition
Panama–Pacific International Exposition
The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was a world's fair held in San Francisco, California between February 20 and December 4 in 1915. Its ostensible purpose was to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, but it was widely seen in the city as an opportunity to showcase its recovery...
and in virtually every subsequent major Bay Area art exhibit until his death. A reviewer wrote that Cuneo's paintings "leave a mellow glow in one's heart. They portray not merely places, but mood and atmosphere."
His early color palette reflected that of Tonalism
Tonalism
Tonalism was an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Between 1880 and 1915, dark, neutral hues such as gray, brown or blue, often dominated compositions by artists associated with the style...
, with earthy, dark, neutral hues. One of his teachers, Whistler, was a leading Tonalist. Cuneo later adopted the lighter pastel palette associated with the Impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
. Still later in his career, he used a palette which "vibrated with low-keyed, intense colors and radiance." His painting style also evolved throughout his career, and he integrated innovations which he came across into his own style, including aspects of Tonalism, Impressionism, and Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
.
From 1916 to 1917 Cuneo worked for a tugboat
Tugboat
A tugboat is a boat that maneuvers vessels by pushing or towing them. Tugs move vessels that either should not move themselves, such as ships in a crowded harbor or a narrow canal,or those that cannot move by themselves, such as barges, disabled ships, or oil platforms. Tugboats are powerful for...
service while living in San Anselmo
San Anselmo, California
San Anselmo is an incorporated town in Marin County, California, in the western United States. San Anselmo is located west of San Rafael, at an elevation of 46 feet . It is located about north of San Francisco. Neighboring towns include San Rafael to the east, Fairfax to the west, and Ross to the...
, painting maritime scenes in his spare time. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts during the summer sessions of 1920, 1925, 1935, and 1936.
For his many exceptional paintings of the Bay Area, Cuneo was known as The Painter of San Francisco. Arthur Millier of the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
wrote that Cuneo's landscapes "breathe the essential strength and poetry of his region." Another critic noted that "they are the very soul and essence of California materialized in line and color." In addition to his California landscapes, in 1928 he also painted scenes of the Arizona desert. Cuneo said that "a landscape should embrace volume, simplicity, unity, a good sense of color values, rhythm of line, and above all, light."
In 1934 Cuneo received a commission from the Public Works of Art Project
Public Works of Art Project
The Public Works of Art Project was a program to employ artists, as part of the New Deal, during the Great Depression. It was the first such program, running from December 1933 to June 1934...
to paint two lunette
Lunette
In architecture, a lunette is a half-moon shaped space, either filled with recessed masonry or void. A lunette is formed when a horizontal cornice transects a round-headed arch at the level of the imposts, where the arch springs. If a door is set within a round-headed arch, the space within the...
mural
Mural
A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.-History:Murals of...
s of Bay Area Hills in the foyer of Coit Tower
Coit Tower
Coit Tower is a tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 at the request of Lillie Hitchcock Coit to beautify the city of San Francisco; Coit bequeathed one-third of her estate to the city "to be expended in an...
. A number of Cuneo's paintings were featured in the 1935 inaugural exhibition of the San Francisco Museum of Art. One of them, California Hills, was honored with the Museum's Purchase Prize award.
After a brief illness, Cuneo died in San Francisco on December 27, 1939.
Although he had been a popular artist with many well-received exhibits throughout his life, Cuneo had found himself unable to successfully market his paintings due to the economic conditions created by the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. This led to feelings that he had failed. San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
columnist Herb Caen
Herb Caen
Herbert Eugene Caen was a Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco journalistwhose daily column of local goings-on, social and political happenings,...
wrote that the artist's wife found "more than one hundred hitherto unseen Cuneo paintings, hidden in his two studios – in corners, in trunks, under books (some even hanging turned to the wall by the artist)." Many of these paintings were subsequently displayed in solo exhibitions, in 1940 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, in 1949 at the de Young Museum, and in 1961 at San Francisco's Gallery of Fine Arts.
A critic wrote in 1991 that Cuneo "was a Cezannesque purist worth remembering".
Exhibitions and collections
Cuneo's numerous solo exhibitions included ones in London, Paris, Rome, New York, and Los Angeles. His work was featured in exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of ArtMetropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
(1933), Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(New York), San Francisco Art Association
San Francisco Art Association
The San Francisco Art Association was an organization that promoted California artists, held art exhibitions, published a periodical, and established an art school. Over its lifetime, the association helped establish a Northern California regional flavor of California Tonalism as differentiated...
(1916–34), Golden Gate International Exposition
Golden Gate International Exposition
The Golden Gate International Exposition , held at San Francisco, California's Treasure Island, was a World's Fair that celebrated, among other things, the city's two newly-built bridges. The San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge was dedicated in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge was dedicated in 1937...
(1939), California Palace of the Legion of Honor
California Palace of the Legion of Honor
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor is a fine art museum in San Francisco, California...
, and the de Young Museum.
A 2009 exhibit at Museo ItaloAmericano
Museo ItaloAmericano
Museo ItaloAmericano, also known as the Italian American Museum, is a museum in San Francisco, California, the only to focus solely on Italian and Italian-American art and culture. The nonprofit museum was founded in 1978 and is located within the Fort Mason Center...
, Cuneo: A Family of Early California Artists, presented a retrospective of the work of Rinaldo, Cyrus and Egisto Cuneo. It was the first exhibit to display the work of the three brothers together.
His work is also in many museum collections, including Oakland Museum of California
Oakland Museum of California
Oakland Museum of California or Oakland Museum is a museum dedicated to the art, history, and natural science of California located in Oakland, California....
, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, Sierra Nevada Museum (Reno), de Young Museum, Laguna Art Museum
Laguna Art Museum
The Laguna Art Museum is a museum located in Laguna Beach, California on Pacific Coast Highway.An exhibition titled ...
, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....
, The Huntington, and Museo ItaloAmericano
Museo ItaloAmericano
Museo ItaloAmericano, also known as the Italian American Museum, is a museum in San Francisco, California, the only to focus solely on Italian and Italian-American art and culture. The nonprofit museum was founded in 1978 and is located within the Fort Mason Center...
.