Seven Nudes in a Landscape

This depiction of seven nudes in a landscape is more academic in subject and more expressive in its brushwork than other, more hard-edged examples that the artist was best known for. Canadé was a self-taught artist who originally started as a house painter—one of a number of odd jobs he performed in Brooklyn after immigrating from San Giorgio Albanese, Italy in 1892 following the collapse of his family’s wealth. Canadé had his first solo exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1925 and subsequently, an exhibition of his paintings there in 1927. Weyhe typically showed graphic artists; “painting exhibitions at the gallery tended to be the exception rather than the rule” print scholar and collector Reba White Williams stated in her 1996 dissertation, indicating that the owner perhaps saw something distinct in Canadé’s painting style.