LUIGI SPIZZIRRI

Painter and teacher Luigi Spizzirri was born in the town of Spezzano, in the Cosenza Province, in the Calabria region of Italy in 1894. He immigrated to the United States and settled in Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with the following teachers: still-life, marine and figure painter Emil Carlsen; landscape, portrait and marine artist Robert William Vonnoh; landscape, animal and portrait painter Joseph Thurman Pearson, Jr.; landscape, still-life and figure painter Daniel Garber; landscape, genre and portrait painter Philip Leslie Hale; and plein-air landscapist and portraitist William Merritt Chase. Spizzirri was a member of the Graphic Sketch Club of Philadelphia, where he was among the exhibitors, along with Lazar Raditz, of the Club’s 1929 show to which he contributed a work entitled “Scholars of the Book”. This painting was described as “a spiritual conception” in a New York Times review. Spizzirri later lived in Camden, New Jersey. In 1936 the artist served on the selection jury for the South Jersey Society of Artists’ first annual exhibition, along with Frederick Nunn, Florence Cannon, Natalie Mitchell, and Raymond Bancroft. Spizzirri’s work was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1917, 1928, and 1930; the Corcoran Gallery, New York in 1923 and 1926; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia in 1923 and 1924.