Ottone Rosai

Florentine Ottone Rosai (1895–1957) was born in the San Frediano quarter, the third of four children to a poor family, and as a boy was expected to take up his father's carpentry workshop. Instead, he showed enough talent as an artist to be admitted into the Istituto d’Arti Decorative by Sante Croce and the Accademia, although he was thrown out of both, preferring to spend time in his old haunts, painting the streets and faces of the people there.

Even his closest friends agreed that he was a difficult character.

Rosai flirted early in his career with the Futurists and Cubists. After fighting in the First World War (he was wounded twice and was awarded a medal for courage) he wrote about his experiences in the first of several books, The Book of a Hooligan (1919) and left the Futurists behind for a study of early Florentine masters, especially Masaccio and Fra Angelico, although Cézanne would be the greatest influence in his work as he painted the streets of a now long lost Florence and the omini 'the defeated' ordinary people doing ordinary things, developing his unique magical realism style.