Cesare Augusto Detti was born in Spoleto (Perugia) in 1847. Very young, he was a pupil in Rome of F. Podesti, F. Coghetti and M. Fortuny. He soon moved from the production of small costume watercolors to oil painting, preferring genre subjects which, thanks to a dazzling palette, were judged "irresistible" by amateurs and collectors. Moving to Paris in the 1970s, he began exhibiting at the Salon since 1879, with wide acclaim, while continuing to send works to the most important Italian exhibitions (in 1877, in Naples, L'addio alla patria and in 1880, in Turin , Spoils of War and Lost in the Fog). The attention of the merchant A. Goupil contributed to his success and extended the painter's fame also to the English and American markets. He was present at the exhibitions in Paris (1889, Temps heureux, L’Aurore, Trois bons amis, Un mariage; 1890, Le tricheur), in Milan (1906, Opéra-Paris Ball, Sunbeam, Evening Prayers); his very rich production was marked by that pasticheur taste with which the artist combined neo-Flemish virtuosity (Il Duca di Guisa, Teatro Nuovo, Spoleto) and cutesy quotes from English and French examples of the eighteenth century (The walk in the villa, Le signorine Detti and the Portrait of a lady with a dog, all in the Municipal Art Gallery of Spoleto), also looking at J. L. E. Meissonier and partly at Fortuny. He died in Paris in 1914.