Antonie Sminck Pitloo
Dutch, 1790 – 1837
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Antonie Sminck Pitloo (1790 – 1837 in Naples) was a Dutch painter. His surname was originally Pitlo, but he added the extra "o" because he was often mistaken for an Italian while resident in Italy. In Italian he is also known as Antonio van Pitloo. Pitloo started studying painting first at Paris and then at Rome, where there was already an international artistic colony, in 1811. He took advantage of a scholarship offered by Louis Bonaparte, the King of Holland. In 1815, after the fall of Bonaparte, the scholarship payments ceased. He was then invited to Naples by the Russian diplomat and art connoisseur Count Grigory Vladimirovich Orloff. In 1816, Pitloo won, in a public competition, the post of professor of landscape at the Neapolitan Academy.
He was considered a leading exponent of the "Posillipo School" of painting, named to the area where he lived in Naples. His paintings have been compared to precursors of Impressionism, some sixty years before this was invented.
