Charles Perugini artwork • painting • for sale Portrait of a young woman (possibly Kate Perugini)

Born in Naples in 1839 to Italian parents, Charles Perugini spent his childhood in England. When he was 11, Horace Vernet, to whom drawings by the young Charles had been presented, recommended Rome as the place where he should study. There Charles worked under Guiseppe Bonolis and the academic painter Guiseppe Mancinelli and was hired in 1854 as an apprentice by the then famous Ary Scheffer in Paris. There he met Charles Dickens, whose daughter Kate he would later marry. The refined and rather exotic Perugini also met the eccentric English painter Frederic (Lord) Leighton in Paris, with whom he became good friends. In 1863, Perugini returned to London, where the now famous Leighton took him under his wing. Perugini gathered a solid group of admirers around him. He was a much sought-after portrait painter and his genre scenes, which show admiration for Greek and Roman antiquity, show the influence of Leighton and Alma Tadema.