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A Venetian by birth, Federico Zandomeneghi was associated with the Macchiaioli in Florence before moving to Paris in 1874 at the age of 33. He was never to return to Italy. By the late 1870’s he had become a habitué of the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes on the Place Pigalle in Montmartre, where he met and befriended Edgar Degas. The two artists, both difficult, ill-tempered characters, were to remain lifelong friends. Degas persuaded Zandomeneghi to exhibit at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, and the Italian also took part in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1880, 1881 and 1886. Zandomeneghi’s success in Paris, where he was represented by Paul Durand-Ruel, was never as great as that of Degas and Renoir, while he remained largely unappreciated in Italy until after his death. Indeed, when the Italian art critic Diego Martelli visited Paris in 1878, he wrote to the painter Giovanni Fattori that Zandomeneghi’s work belonged to ‘a new kind of painting whose concept and aim those at home cannot comprehend.’ Indeed, it was not 1914 that Zandomeneghi was given his first one-man show in his native country, at the Venice Biennale of that year.
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