A painter of historical and genre subjects, Carlo Wostry was also a sculptor and engraver. He studied in Vienna and also at the Baviere School in Munich, so gaining a varied and comprehensive training as a young man.

His first exhibition was in his hometown of Trieste, Italy and he painted a number of fine portraits there and soon produced a good living from his vocation as an artist.

Greatly influenced by Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) the great portrait and genre painter from Ferare, Italy. Wostry followed him to Paris, where he was to continue painting portraits of societies Elite, but also genre scenes as they promenaded along the Champs Elysée and other grand boulevards in the city centre.

La Belle Epoque was at the heart of Paris, being the fashion centre of the world, where ‘bonne viveur’ was the rule not the exception. The Upper Classes from all around the civilised Western World queued to have their portraits painted and they were not disappointed. The Frenchman James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902) and the American James Abbott MacNeil Whistler (1834-1903), both based in London, were among the artists frequently travelling to Paris, the former ultimately settling there after the untimely death of his mistress Kathleen Newton, and so it was good place for an aspiring artist to be.

Exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon, Wostry was to gain an Honourable Mention in 1898, but he did not limit himself to just Paris, he also frequented Rome and the Museum of Modern Art there has an example of his work entitled “Tears” and in his home town Museum Revoltella in Trieste three of his paintings can be seen, one being a landscape, another entitled “The Artist” the third “The Source of Clitumno”.


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Bibliography: E. Bénézit “Dictionnaire des Peintres”