Rinaldo Cuneo (July 2, 1877 – December 27, 1939), was an American artist known for his landscape paintings and murals. He was dubbed "the Painter of San Francisco".
Rinaldo Cuneo was born in San Francisco on July 2, 1877,[1][note 1] part of an Italian American family of artists and musicians. Rinaldo was the second of Giovanni (John) Cuneo and his wife Annie's seven children.[2] Rinaldo and his brothers Cyrus (1879–1916) and Egisto (1890–1972) all became artists.[1] Their sisters Erminia, Clorinda, Evelina, and Clelia were interested in music and opera.[2][3] The family lived on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco's Italian American neighborhood of North Beach.[1][2] As an adult, Rinaldo's home and studio, on a cliff with unobstructed views of the bay, was just a block from his childhood home.[1][2]
His early color palette reflected that of Tonalism, with earthy, dark, neutral hues. One of his teachers, Whistler, was a leading Tonalist. Cuneo later adopted the lighter pastel palette associated with the Impressionists. Still later in his career, he used a palette which "vibrated with low-keyed, intense colors and radiance."[9] His painting style also evolved throughout his career, and he integrated innovations which he came across into his own style,[6] including aspects of Tonalism, Impressionism, and Modernism.[9]
From 1916 to 1917 Cuneo worked for a tugboat service while living in San Anselmo, painting maritime scenes in his spare time.[1] He taught at the California School of Fine Arts during the summer sessions of 1920, 1925, 1935, and 1936.[1]
Bay Area Hills, 1934, 108 x 54 inches
For his many exceptional paintings of the Bay Area, Cuneo was known as The Painter of San Francisco.[2][4][9][10] Arthur Millier of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Cuneo's landscapes "breathe the essential strength and poetry of his region."[11] Another critic noted that "they are the very soul and essence of California materialized in line and color."[9] In addition to his California landscapes, in 1928 he also painted scenes of the Arizona desert.[1] Cuneo said that "a landscape should embrace volume, simplicity, unity, a good sense of color values, rhythm of line, and above all, light."[12]
After a brief illness, Cuneo died in San Francisco on December 27, 1939.[13][note 1]
Although he had been a popular artist with many well-received exhibits throughout his life, Cuneo had found himself unable to successfully market his paintings due to the economic conditions created by the Great Depression. This led to feelings that he had failed. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote that the artist's wife found『more than one hundred hitherto unseen Cuneo paintings, hidden in his two studios – in corners, in trunks, under books (some even hanging turned to the wall by the artist).』Many of these paintings were subsequently displayed in solo exhibitions, in 1940 at the San Francisco Museum of Art, in 1949 at the de Young Museum, and in 1961 at San Francisco's Gallery of Fine Arts.[2]
A critic wrote in 1991 that Cuneo "was a Cezannesque purist worth remembering".[14]
A 2009 exhibit at Museo ItaloAmericano, Cuneo: A Family of Early California Artists, presented a retrospective of the work of Rinaldo, Cyrus and Egisto Cuneo. It was the first exhibit to display the work of the three brothers together.[15]
^ abHughes gives Cuneo's birth date as July 2, 1877 and his death date as December 29, 1939.[1] Numerous online sources list the birth/death years as 1877/1939.[2][4][5][6][7][9][10][17] This would make him 62 at the time of his death. But the December 28, 1939 Los Angeles Times article announcing that he had died on December 27, 1939 gave his age at the time of death as 59.[13]
