Cherubino Patà
Swiss, 1827-1899
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Pietro Antonio Cherubino Patà was a Swiss painter
Cherubino Patà was born in Sonogno in 1827 as one of six children of the shepherd Abbondio Patà and his wife Apollonia (née Tamò). He attended a drawing school in Locarno and was commissioned to decorate the Sonogno church in 1854 . From 1856 to 1858 he traveled through western Switzerland as a portrait painter before emigrating to Lyon in 1860 . There he married the German Swiss Emilie Schnewlin (1839-1898), with whom he had two daughters and a son.
After the family had settled in Paris , Patà exhibited regularly in the salons there from 1868. He made friends with the French painter Gustave Courbet and became his student, assistant and business agent. In 1873, Courbet, as a member of the Paris Commune, was forced to flee abroad. Patà followed him into exile in La Tour-de-Peilz and the two made numerous landscape paintings together . After a trip to Algeria in the 1880s, he lived in La Chaux-de-Fonds and finally in Gordola , where he died in 1899.