Wright Auction

American born artist Richard Blow is credited with reviving the Florentine mosaic tradition of intarsia. Trained in painting, Blow studied with Leon Kroll at the Art Institute of Chicago and with Andre Lhote at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1926 he traveled to Italy with his brother and shortly thereafter purchased a Renaissance villa in Santa Margherita a Montici. Blow traveled back and forth, painting wherever he went, between Europe and the United States until 1941 and the attack on Pearl Harbour when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy.


Richard Blow with assistant

After the war, Richard Blow returned to his Italian villa and with the help of Constantino Nivola and Eva Carocci, he started the Montici workshop to create works of art in marble and semi-precious stones. Blow provided the subject matter for the works produced in the Montici workshop. Like his paintings, his stone masterworks feature figurative scenes, landscapes and geometric shapes. From wall hangings to tabletops, the workshop produced nearly 1500 works of the highest quality before his death in 1983.


Examples of figurative motifs by Richard Blow, sold at Wright in March of 2005: