Nicolino Calyo

The portrait, landscape, and panorama painter Nicolino Calyo, was born in Naples, where he studied at the Royal Academy. He traveled through Europe, and lived briefly in Malta and Spain. He immigrated to the United States in 1834 and set up a studio in Baltimore. From 1838 to 1855 Calyo is listed in the New York City directories as a “portrait and landscape painter” or “professor of painting.” In the late 1840s he was working with his Italian-born son John A. Calyo (1818-1893) as “N. Calyo & Son,” historical painters and teachers. During this period, his home in New York became a gathering place for exiled Europeans, including the future Napoleon III (1808-1873). Calyo revisited Spain briefly and worked as Court painter to Queen Maria Cristina (1806-1878), but in 1874 returned to New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. He showed paintings in the exhibitions of the American Society of Painters in Watercolour in New York from 1867 to 1869. Calyo painted scenes of the Mexican War of 1846-48 and a forty-foot panorama of the Connecticut River, but he is better known for his watercolor and gouache views of Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and the areas surrounding these cities. His Italian training “dominates his method . . . conditioning his liberal use of gouache, which imparts an opaque, slightly chalky surface to his work, setting it apart from the ‘English’ style of transparent watercolour more familiar to American artists of that period.”