About The Artist Fernando GUALTIERI Fernando Gualtieri was born on the 1st December 1919 at Longlaville in the Meurthe-et-Moselle area of France, where many Italian families had emigrated in search of work in the mines. He found it hard to tolerate the dusty climate of Eastern France, so his parents decided to send him, and his sister, under the supervision of his grandmother 'La Nonna Caterina', back to rejoin the family in Viserba di Rimini, in Italy, to a little house beside the sea. His father died and his mother stayed alone in Longlaville where she had to work as cook and manager in the works' canteen, in order to provide for her family. 'The little French boy" as he was called in Viserba was the best at drawing in the school. After a career as a footballer, playing left wing in a first division national team, his studies were interrupted by the war. He became a cartographer in Yugoslavia and thus escaped the constraints of soldiering. He was just 30 when he came to Paris in 1950, unaware that this visit made 'just for pleasure' would transform his destiny. He was never to return to live in Italy. Almost at once his life became the difficult life of a bohemian but then he found his place and became the undisputed painter of "The Splendour of Reality". Copyright 1999 All rights reserved Concorde Fine Arts

<