Item #Cat313 Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio. Art – Immigration – Italy – Pennsylvania – Photography, Andrea Sborigi.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.
[Art – Immigration – Italy – Pennsylvania – Photography] Sborigi, Andrea, et al.

Album of Photographs Showing the Life, Work, and Circle of the Fresco Painter Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-Born Decorative Painter Active in Western Pennsylvania, With Images of His Family in Rome and His Life in the United States, Together with an Advertising Postal Card for His Pittsburgh Studio.

Western Pennsylvania: 1889–1908. Cloth album, 14 x 10 inches. 238 photographs on 48 pages, most approximately 3 x 4 inches, including printing-out paper prints, cyanotypes, and silver gelatin photographs. Many annotated. A few photographs lacking, with occasional cuts and minor losses to several pages; overall largely complete, the photographs generally excellent. Also with a printed advertising postal card (“A. Sborigi, Artist in Fresco […] Studio, No. 68 Smithfield Street, Pittsburgh, Pa.”), on a U.S. 1¢ UX3 postal card (c. 1873–1878). Excellent. Item #Cat313

A particularly well composed and extensive photographic record of the life and work of Andrea Sborigi, an Italian-born fresco painter active in western Pennsylvania from at least the 1870s. A contemporary advertising card places him in Pittsburgh by the mid-1870s, working as a decorative painter of churches, theaters, and public interiors. Newspaper references trace his career over the following decades: in 1876 he appears in The Pittsburgh Post in connection with an Italian mutual society; by 1891 he is described in the Pittsburg Dispatch as a “well-known artist,” actively engaged with the city’s artistic circles; and in 1900 The Ligonier Echo records that he had frescoed the Lutheran church in Ligonier and was commissioned to carry out additional work at the First Lutheran Church in Greensburg. A final notice from 1901 documents his involvement in a lawsuit following an alleged false arrest, offering a rare glimpse of the hazards and frictions of immigrant life in the city. Together these scattered references outline a sustained, decades-long career as a working decorative painter in the region. He died in 1918, a member of a Freemason society, with notices appearing with the usual masonic formalities but no obituaries or additional information about his life found in newspaper records.

The album itself fills in the personal dimension behind this documentary record. Sborigi, whose family was from Rome, appears here not as an anonymous tradesman but as part of a transatlantic network, with photographs of relatives in Italy alongside images of his professional and social life in Pennsylvania. His trajectory reflects an earlier and more specialized phase of Italian immigration to the United States, when arrivals from central and northern Italy often came as skilled artisans rather than industrial laborers. By the 1890s, when most of the photographs in the album were made, this earlier cohort overlapped with the much larger wave of southern Italian immigration.

The photographs are particularly well composed and intimate. Some of them, the more stoic portraits, were likely done as studies for his fresco work. Sborigi was an accomplished photographer for an amateur. Many of the photographs show his family both in America and Italy, and his friend circle in the United States. Also included are many photographs of Columbus Day festivities, along with photographs of western Pennsylvania life, and photographs of his work and the work of artists in his circle. One photograph shows the interior of a local mayor’s house, one shows the light from a flash bulb exploding in his hand. There are many portraits, well annotated, of his family in Rome, including his father Thomas, many self-portraits (with multi angle shots of his very prominent moustache), and many pictures of his son Guido. His interior portraits are a particular highlight, showing his technical ability as a photographer. The latest photograph in the book shows him in 1908, and a 1901 portrait of his son Guido is the latest we see of him—the others show him as a younger boy. Overall a highly unique and uncommon photographic record of the life and work of an Italian immigrant artisan in western Pennsylvania in the late 19th century, with the stoic and intimate portraits done for his fresco work a particular highlight.

Price: $2,750.00

Status: On Hold

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