Pietro Annigoni: A Prediction

"St. Joseph the Worker"(detail) by Pietro Annigoni

"When I made my first visit to England in 1949, I was embarrassed, even frightened, by my ignorance of the English language. Five years later, when I painted the Queen at Buckingham Palace, my English was still so poor that we talked to each other in French. And yet, the very first word I learned as a child was an English one, 'cow'. The house in which I was born, on the outskirts of Milan, overlooked fields where cattle grazed, and my mother held me in her arms at the window, pointed to the cattle and repeated the word over and over again until I, too, could say it.

My mother's parents were Italians but she had been born and brought up in California, and English - or American - was her language. My father, Ricciardo Annigoni, was a mathematician and engineer working in America when he met my mother, Teresa Botti, and married her in New York. Then returning to Italy, they made their home first in Lucca, then Milan where I was born. Not long after my younger brother was born my father told me that when I grew up, I would be an artist. I had myself decided that even earlier but without knowing, as my father did, how hard I would have to work to become a good artist. He had some talent for drawing, and as a young man, may well have thought of becoming an artist himself. 

There were several of his drawings hanging in our home, one of them a self-portrait which was really good and which I tried to imitate at a very early age. But I was six when I made a curious drawing that/ presumably because it had some element of originality, prompted my father to say, 'You'll become a great painter one day.' From then on he did all he could to make his prediction come true. Even before I went to school he gave me lessons in drawing, painting - and his beloved mathematics."

To be continued

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)