Giacomo Francesco Cipper (1664-1736)

• Also known as Il Todeschini, was an Austrian painter.
• Born in 1664 in Feldkirch in Austria, very close to the Swiss border.
• By 1696 he is recorded as living in Milan.
• There he married and had 10 children.
• Cipper specialised in painting low-life subjects – beggars, street-sellers, vagabonds – a genre in which Giacomo Ceruti also later excelled.
• The artist’s nickname ‘il Todeschini’ is presumably a variation of ‘il Todesco’ (or ‘il Tedesco’, meaning ‘the German’), as Cipper sometimes signed his pictures, referring to his Northern European roots.

• A highly productive painter of landscapes in the caravaggesca manner, his first attributed work is dated 1700.
• He operated in Lombardy and in the Veneto.
• His last known work is Self-portrait (1736), now at Hampton Court Palace.

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