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Who was Donatus Buongiorno?

Donatus Buongiorno was a late-19th- and early-20th-century Italian and American artist of Naples and New York.

 

Born in 1865 in Solofra, Avellino, he moved to Naples in the 1800s to attend the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli (formerly known as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts) from which he graduated, and where he later taught.

 

In 1892 he emigrated to New York, which became his base for the next 27 years and where he became a naturalized American citizen in 1895. In 1919 he returned to Italy to live full-time, though he continued to travel to the U.S. for work until 1931. Regardless of which country was home at any given time, he travelled to the other country every couple of years for months-long work stints.

 

In New York in the 1890s, he worked as a designer in a wallpaper factory. In the early 1900s, he painted commissioned murals in Italian-American Catholic churches in New York, Boston, Indianapolis and Brattleboro, Vermont.

 

In Italy, in 1908, he worked on the restoration of an important 17th-century church in his hometown of Solofra, Avellino—La Collegiata di San Michele Arcangelo—and had an exhibition of paintings.

 

Throughout his life, he made easel paintings which he sold out of his studios in New York and Naples. He also imported paintings from Italy to the U.S. which he sold in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere, acting as a dealer for other artists.

 

Buongiorno died in 1935 in Casalnuovo di Napoli, a town near Naples.