Born in Mede Lomellina on 7 December 1881, he died on 16 September 1941 in Portofino. A pupil of Cesare Tallone and Vespasiano Bignami at the Brera Academy, he has been ex-aequo winner with Ambrogio Alciati of the competition for a historical painting banned by the Milanese Academy since 1901, with the opera Cleopatra luxuriant; in 1908 he won the Mylius prize with the work the Hero; in 1912 he won the Fumagalli prize and in 1922 the prize of the City of Florence. In the first decade of the twentieth century he achieved notoriety as an elegant and fashionable portrait painter, not only in Italy but also in England and Egypt. He is also a skilled landscape painter during his repeated trips to America, North Africa, England, France and Rhodes. Between 1924 and 1925 he stays in Egypt, called to the court of King Fuad; in 1927 he went to Algeria. These trips will be occasions for two large and highly successful solo shows, respectively at the Pesaro Gallery in Milan and in London, organized here by the magazine “The Studio”. He participates in numerous exhibitions in Rome, Venice, Milan, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo in Brazil, in Cairo. At the Venice Biennale of 1930 he exhibited a self-portrait of him, now in the collection of self-portraits at the Uffizi in Florence. Paintings of him are in the Ricci-Oddi Museum in Piacenza and in the Modern Art Galleries of Milan, San Paolo in Brazil and Lima in Peru. Among his works stand out the portrait of Lida Borelli, those of Princess Amalia of Bavaria; the Crown Prince and Princess Mary; of the Duchess of Pistoia; of the Hereditary Prince of Egypt Faruk and numerous others, preserved in Italian and English private salons and galleries. Marco Praga's portrait is of him at the Scala Museum. Together with the portraits of him, the female nudes that often recur in his pictorial subjects should be remembered. While his early works of late scapigliata ancestry are in tune with light colors, those of the last few years take on vivid hues and greater intensity.