The Sophisticated Pig: A Moody Farm Portrait in the Italian Poster Style
There is a smile on this pig, and it is not an accident of the drawing. Head high, snout lifted to catch whatever the evening is serving, one bright eye creased with what can only be called contentment, she receives the full state portrait treatment of our Italian Poster Style series and behaves like an animal who always suspected she deserved it. The series stages its sitters alone on velvet black in the lamplight of Italy's classic advertising posters, and the pig, so often cast as the farm's comedian, turns out to be its most natural aristocrat.
It helps that the poster stage has always rewarded appetite. The aperitivo posters sold the pleasures of the table with grinning devils and dancing clowns; the pig is the table's own patron animal, and in this light, cream and rose and rust, she looks less like livestock than like the hostess of the whole Italian feast.
From the Collection
Vintage Pig Wall Art Print, 1920's Italian Poster Style
A pig's head in warm profile, rose snout and a slight smile, in cream and rust on velvet black.
From $34.50 · Free shipping
VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
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The Posters Behind the Series
Italy's poster age covered food with particular love. The same Ricordi presses that printed Cappiello's aperitivo fantasies turned out radiant advertisements for pasta, preserves, and cured meats, a world of edible theatre we visit in the Maccheroni poster, where even noodles get a dancing mascot. Food, on an Italian poster, was never fuel. It was civilization, advertised.
The pig portrait stands in that tradition and gently reverses it. The old posters sold the pig's products; this one portraits the pig, at monumental scale, in evening light, with the air of a founder surveying the firm. The smile suggests she finds the reversal fair.
Reading the Portrait
The profile is drawn like a coin's: the long intelligent face in three-quarter view, the ear tipped forward, the eye bright and amused, with fine lines at its corner that any portraitist would call character. The snout is the picture's rose, a deep pink disc worked in stipple until it seems almost polished, catching the light the way the whole animal catches the mood, completely.
Down the neck and shoulder, the light turns to rust and copper, the warm tide that runs through every portrait in this series, and the bristles along the jaw are drawn one by one, honest farmyard detail admitted into the grandeur without apology. That is the portrait's charm in one decision: nothing about the pig is prettified away. She is grand because she is entirely herself, at four times life size, in lamplight.
The Pig in Italy
No animal feeds Italy like this one, and Italy says so in a proverb every child knows: del maiale non si butta via niente, of the pig, nothing is thrown away. Parma gives him prosciutto, San Daniele answers, Tuscany raises the striped Cinta Senese on acorns and chestnuts, and the winter pig harvest, the maialata, remains in much of rural Italy a festival of work and feasting combined, neighbors gathered, knives out, the year's larder made by hand.
The pig is also, in the Italian telling, an intelligent and even lucky animal, the farm's banker, converting acorns and whey into wealth. The portrait's self satisfied air is documentary, not invention. Of all the menagerie's sitters, she has the soundest historical claim to look pleased with herself.
Velvet and the Engraved Line
Pigskin defeats most portraitists, being neither fur nor hide but something smoother and stranger, and the portrait solves it with the engraver's oldest tools, stipple for the snout's polish, long fine hatching for the cheek and jowl, so the surfaces turn like satin under the light. Sparse bristles are admitted honestly, each one a single stroke, the farmyard's signature on the fine art.
Against the scratched velvet ground, her pale face glows the way faces glow in candlelit farmhouses, and the rust shoulder anchors her in the series' shared dusk. It is the warmest picture in the menagerie, the one that hangs in a kitchen like an invitation.
One of a Menagerie
The pig stands with the full poster company, the fox, the frog, the cats and the uninvited guests, all staged on the same dark ground, a series introduced in Italian-Inspired Animal Prints: Quiet Drama with a Graphic Edge. She is its most contented citizen, and the sitter most likely to be described by visitors as smiling, because she is. The whole company is in our 1920's Italian Poster Style collection.
