British-Italian artist Estella Louisa Michaela Canziani (1887–1964) was a painter, intrepid traveller, collector, researcher, travelogue writer, folklorist and illustrator. She exhibited in Britain, Italy and France from the 1900s to the 1930s, showing subject paintings, portraits and landscapes, in oil, watercolour and gouache.

Sir George Stegmann Gibb (1850–1925), General Manager, North Eastern Railway (1891–1906)

Yet, it is primarily through the tempera paintings she produced to illustrate her Italian travel books that she is represented in UK public art collections today.

Canziani lived all her life at her parent's home, 3 Palace Green, Kensington Palace Gardens, London, and they had a profound influence on her. She remarked that 'for Victorian parents they had advanced ideas on bringing up a child'.

Her upbringing gave her freedom to pursue a professional artistic career, at a time when societal and institutional restrictions meant it was not an option for the majority of women. She was a sickly child and she didn't attend school until she was 12. She recalled her mother, the British-Italian-American artist Louisa Starr (later Canziani) (1845–1909), 'feared I would never be highly educated' but 'hoped that I might become an artist'.

Starr had succeeded in forging a professional artistic career in nineteenth-century Britain. She supported women's suffrage and gave public talks championing historic women artists. Training at Leighs Art School (later Heatherleys), she was recommended to the Royal Academy of Arts School where, in 1867, she became the first woman to win a gold medal. From 1866 she exhibited subject paintings, modern genre and history paintings and society portraits at the RA, Grosvenor Gallery and Royal Society of British Artists (RBA).

Canziani followed closely in her mother's footsteps, training at the Copernico school, then at the RA, with tutors including rural naturalist painter George Clausen and Impressionist painter John Singer Sargent. From childhood, she was introduced to many of her mother's fellow British artists, including William Powell Frith, Frederic Leighton and John Everett Millais and, as a result, she became exceptionally well-trained and connected.

From the age of 14, she showed work at the Society of Women Artists and Grosvenor Gallery and, at 17 years old, began exhibiting at the RA and Liverpool exhibitions, later becoming a member of the RBA. Unlike her mother, however, she also worked as an illustrator. And, while many of Canziani's paintings exhibited in Britain are visually and thematically different to her illustrative work, common ground is evident in some of her subject paintings.

Canziani's father, Enrico Canziani, an engineer and a prominent figure of the Italian colony in London, was also supportive of her cultural and artistic education.

Enrico and Estella Louisa Michaela Canziani (1887–1964)

He introduced her to collecting through study at the Natural History Museum and on visits to Italy he acted as her chaperone, research and sketching assistant and editor while she produced writing and paintings for three lavishly illustrated travel books.

Canziani's choice of tempera as her medium for these paintings places her as a contributor to its wider early twentieth-century revival – an initiative led by the Society of Painters in Tempera, which Canziani joined in 1904, and the Arts and Crafts Movement, to whose exhibiting society Canziani also belonged.

She was undoubtedly inspired by her mother's interest in painting Italian people, as well as her own immersion in Italian culture during visits to remote regions of the country, far from common Grand Tour routes. Neither were they alone in this interest; other artists, including Sargent, were drawn to the Italian mountains.

In 1910 Canziani showed a, now untraced, painting titled Bargaining at the RA, which shares the same title as the opening illustration of her first Italian travelogue, Costumes, Traditions and Songs of Savoy (1911), a book about that cultural/historical area of Italy in the north-western Alps.

The illustration, one of 50 that feature in Savoy, depicts two women in traditional regional costume at a fabric stall. It encapsulates Canziani's concerted interest in this subject matter. The artist explained that she was 'struck by how rapidly modernised parts of the country were becoming, although in outlying places the people still believe in fairies, and have not yet been influenced by so-called civilisation' and wanted to 'preserve what was obviously perishing'.

Her book records Savoyard traditions and folklore, told to her by locals and researched in books and manuscripts in local libraries. It records her experiences of places, illustrations of figures in traditional costume, landscapes and domestic architecture and song lyrics with musical scores.

She painted and researched by day and undertook writing in the evening by candlelight. Her fluency in Italian, Italian heritage, financial ability to pay models and confident ease in communicating with people of any walk of life were an asset in her search for willing models. She boasts in her autobiography: 'One day I might be talking to a real crowned king or queen, and the next to a pearly king or to a queen crowned with feathers in an English slum.'

She took an ethnographic approach to her research, living with and joining in the activities of locals. Canziani refers to her sitters as peasants, acknowledging their pre-industrial rural way of life but shows them to be more than poor agricultural labourers – in her writings and illustrations, they are also skilled craftspeople.

The artist particularly sought to preserve what she called the 'picturesque costumes', the women's characteristic white bonnets, children's red caps and the brightly coloured and patterned fabrics of their clothing, that were being 'gradually superseded by modern dress'. She depicts women as the makers of fabrics, their everyday clothes and their rituals of dressing one another for ceremonies.

She provides emphatic likenesses, particularly of women and children, with a level of realism, detail and sensitivity in the field of portraiture that confirm her feeling for the Italian people. Her work recalls seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, Italian Renaissance and seventeenth-century Dutch portraiture and Pre-Raphaelite painting, underlining her knowledge of earlier European art.

Costume de ma grandmère, Bourg Saint Maurice, Savoy

Canziani's tactile and near-photographic rendering of costumes, jewellery, metalwork, pottery and woodwork led her to become a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society and to collect examples of those items she depicted. She befriended scholars of folklore and anthropology and joined a network of female traveller-folklorists and collectors connected through the Folklore Society (FLS), which she joined in 1910 and became a council member for from 1922. She wrote numerous articles for the society's journal Folk-lore and later donated her collection to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the London Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum.

Piedmont (1913), Canziani's second travel book, containing 52 illustrations, was inspired by time spent in the Italian mountain villages of north-west Italy, far from the familiar capital of Turin, or her family's second home at Cairate in the Plains of Lombardy. While working on this volume, she lived with a local woman who served as her host and guide and enlisted Eleanour Sinclair Rohde as a translator and editorial assistant.

Return from the Mountains, Cradle and Gerlo (Antrona Piana) provides insight into the environment and traditional ways of living within its terrain. In this traditional Antrona home scene, a seated woman 'carrying a cradle on her back', which 'was the usual way of carrying babies', converses with a standing woman wearing a basket (gerlo) of straw, gathered from the mountains.

Down from the Mountains, Cradle and Gerlo (basket), Antrona Piana, Piedmont

Although a few boys and men are depicted in this volume, women's work – their engagement with creative tasks such as winding and sewing, childcare and chores – is foregrounded. Portraits of little girls, teenage girls and women also feature, the most ornate being depictions of brides.

The artist was interested in traditional costumes and the ways they were being modernised. Valdesi Reading the Bible shows this process in action; she explained, 'A few of the older people still have their caps, but they are giving them up and wear modern clothes'.

Her depictions of jewellery were not merely included for beauty's sake or due to her personal penchant for handicrafts but to document the economic and cultural history of the region for the Vaudois people, who were long known as jewellery sellers. What is more, the inclusion of items such as rings against the evil eye directly related to local religious belief and folklore about the Sarvant (evil spirit).

In Piedmont, she provides histories, from wars to natural disasters, that have shaped the places she has visited and visualises baptism, marriage and death rituals, religious festas (festivals) and cures (pseudo-medical rituals), carnivals, plays, proverbs, dances and songs.

Procession of the Confraternity of Saint Croix, Aosta, Piedmont

Canziani visited Abruzzi, Italy and began work on her third travel book in 1913. Then she travelled on to Morocco and the Canary Islands, where she produced further, currently untraced, ethnographical work. Around this time, she also painted her best-known exhibited painting, Piper of Dreams, first shown at the RA in 1915 – a naturalistic and detailed watercolour painting of a pastoral scene with a boy in a woodland playing a pipe while fairies fly above his head. Its original title Where the little things of the wood live unseen, made reference to the depicted fairies.

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The painting was inspired by Starr's interest in fantasy paintings and Canziani's engagement with Italian folklore, in which fairie stories feature. It is reminiscent of Pre-Raphaelite painting and Canziani's own illustrative work – particularly in the boy's striking costume, including bright blue trousers and a purple hat with peacock feather adornment. With the onset of the First World War, this nostalgic image became popular with troops and their families, prompting the new title and sale of more than 250,000 prints.

During the war, Canziani painted scientific watercolours of wounds and modelled splints. Her notes and sketches from this period are now part of the Imperial War Museum's medical collection. One painting that she produced at home in 1918, Blighty (Britain), provides a poignant representation of a bed-bound convalescent soldier. After the end of the war, she produced an altar decoration painting of The Good Shepherd to commemorate shipwrecked British Navy minesweepers.

In the early 1920s, Canziani painted illustrations for Walter De La Mare's Songs of Childhood (1923), a book of poems with fantasy illustrations featuring landscape backdrops painted in north Staffordshire. And, in the mid-1920s, she illustrated Caroline M. Duncan Jones's The Lord's Minstrel: a simple history of S Francis of Assisi (1927), containing Italian landscapes and imagery that recalls religious paintings of the Italian Renaissance period.

It was not until 1928 that the artist completed her third Italian travel book, Through the Apennines and the Lands of Abruzzi: Landscape and Peasant Life, which focuses on her experiences of life in the villages of the Apennine Mountains in southern Italy.

In the 1930s and 1940s, she illustrated two guidebooks to the British city of Oxford. The first, Oxford's College Gardens (1932), was written by Rohde and contains 24 illustrations by Canziani while the second, Oxford in Brush and Pen (1949), written and illustrated by Canziani in the vein of her Italian travelogues, provides intimate experiences of lesser highlighted aspects of the city.

In the interwar period, Canziani became a Quaker and took an increasing interest in social reform and education, teaching art classes to Jewish girls in Bethnal Green. Her Pearlies Harvest Festival series (1936) was inspired by the hardships of Londoners following the First World War, the 'colour and gaiety' of a Harvest Festival service at the Costers Church of St Mary Magdalene, London and the elaborate Spanish and Regency clothing styles decorated with pearl button pattern worn by the Costermonger market traders.

In later life, Canziani travelled to Sweden and to Spitzbergen, Iceland and the Great Ice Barrier. The paintings she produced there gained her membership of the Royal Geographical Society and they now form part of the RGS collection.

Neither Canziani's exhibited nor her illustrative artwork is well-known in Britain today, yet her travelogues remain popular in Italy, where recent editions have been published. Furthermore, contemporary Italian artist Giorgio Marcoaldi has been inspired to revisit her work through a series of modern-day photographs of the places she visited. It's high time her unique contribution to early twentieth-century British art was better understood.

Katie J. T. Herrington, art historian and curator

This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation

Further reading

Estella Canziani, Costumes, Traditions and Songs of Savoy, Chatto & Windus, 1911

Estella Canziani and Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, Piedmont, Chatto & Windus, 1913

Estella Canziani, Through the Apennines and the Lands of Abruzzi: Landscape and Peasant Life, W. Heffer & Sons, 1928

Estella Canziani, Round about Three Palace Green, Methuen, 1939

Estella Canziani, Oxford in Brush and Pen, London, 1949

Estella Canziani, 'Abruzzese Folklore', in Folk-lore, vol. 39/3, 1928

Estella Canziani, 'Courtship, Marriage and Folk Belief in Val d'Ossola', in Folk-lore, vol. 23/4, 1912

Estella Canziani, 'Sagra del Pesce, Camoglie', in Folk-lore, vol. 71/4, 1960

Estella Canziani, 'Savoy Traditions and Folk-Beliefs', in Folk-lore, vol. 42/1, 1931