Great and Mighty Artist of the Day:Bruno Del Favero
Born Princeton, Michigan, 1910; died Greenwich, Conneticut, 1995
Bruno Del Favero moved from Michigan to northern Italy with his parents at age five, returning in 1928 and settling in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he married and remained for the rest of his days. He made his living as a mason, chauffeur, and landscape gardener. It is not known exactly when or why he began to paint his delicate and mysterious landscapes, but he was exhibiting in local art shows by the early 1970s and took himself seriously enough as an artist to join the Greenwich Art Society. He maintained a studio in the basement of his home, but never shared his art with his wife and five children. After the artist’s death his family introduced his work to New York dealers Shari Cavin and Randall Morris in the late 1990s. Del Favero’s first one-man show outside Greenwich was held at the Cavin-Morris Gallery in 1998.
See his work in Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection, open now through June 9 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.