Gonsalvo was the eldest son of Raffaele Carelli and at 12 years old was already considered a talented artist. In 1833 his works were purchased by Isabella of Bourbon for her private collection and in 1835 his View of the Powder Tower at Posillipo was purchased by the King for the royal collections and exhibited at the Royal Palace. Court dignitaries, ambassadors, but also rich families, competed for his paintings. In short, the prospect of a peaceful and prosperous life for a successful artist opened up before Gonsalvo. But the extraordinary vitality of the man and his fierce artistic curiosity prevailed. In 1837 Gonsalvo moved to Rome with his brother Gabriel, tightening relations with the older generation of the French Academy and getting to know Bartolomeo Pinelli. At the end of 1841, thanks to a letter from Queen Isabella, Gonsalvo moved to Paris where, protected by the royal family, he exhibited at ‘Salons’ in 1842 and 1843, earning major awards and received numerous commissions for works from government ministries, for the Royal Palais and the Gallery of Versailles. On returning to Naples in 1845 he was commissioned by the Czar of Russia to execute the two paintings Naples from the Royal Gardens of Portici and Naples by Camaldoli, now in the Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg.
Provenance: Private collection.
He was also politically active, and in 1848 worked at the ‘Cinque giornate’ in the city of Milan and Lombardy where he met Massimo D’Azeglio, a key political figure of the Renaissance but also a talented landscape painter. He never gave up painting, and merited an appointment as Honorary Professor to the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Naples. In 1860 Carelli was still actively involved in the Risorgimento, participating in the battle of Volturno alongside Garibaldi’s troops. But without forgetting his work that same year he prepared an album of 150 images of the Kingdom for Napoleon III. It was illustrated by Alexander Dumas, a friend of his father with Viaggio da Napoli a Roma. After 1860, he was commissioned by the King Vittorio Emanuele II, to create a collection of sixteen designs involving individual incidents of banditry for a southern collection now housed in the Turin Royal Palace.
During the last decades of his work he took on more of the official role of artist of the newly united country. In addition to being awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 1869, he became master painter to Queen Margaret in 1874 and was nominated to the Academy of San Luca. He continued to work tirelessly until the last day of his life. Throughout a rich century of innovation in managing difficult figurative results Carelli Gonsalvo continuously improved through a series of different artistic experiences without ever betraying his original style. The two young watercolours, dating from the late forties showing the Cathedral Square of Taormina and the Plain of the Temples at Paestum partially attest to this. The first is obviously indicative of his posillipisti form, both evident of a ‘live action’ in its execution, with quick touches of white lead and colour to mark the angle of the
light and break the monochrome of brown stock. In the second, the design becomes more accurate, almost coy, depicting the scene perfectly designed and constructed. The march of the peasantry, their elegant movements, are not at all common. An elegance, that is to say, quite French. Inevitably, the reference to Robert Leopold and his Les massonneurs dans le Marais Pontins (The Return of the Harvesters in the Pontine Marshes), is considered one of his masterpieces, and was presented at the Paris Salon in 1831 and is now in the collection of the Louvre.