Innocenti was the elder of the two painters of this name, and the confusion between them is worth stating plainly: auction catalogues routinely give him the dates 1871–1961, which in fact belong to Camillo Innocenti, the Roman painter of the Italian Belle Époque. Recent scholarship on Camillo — notably by the Berardi gallery in Rome — records that the two have too often been merged despite obvious stylistic differences, a problem compounded by forgeries on the market. Guglielmo was the father, working in the second half of the nineteenth century; his dated pictures run to the start of the 1890s.
Here an elderly gentleman in an eighteenth-century powdered wig, lilac frock coat, pale breeches and scarlet buckled shoes stands braced before a music stand, cheeks distended, straining at a large open score. Behind him is a bookcase, a candle sconce and a dark old master canvas.
His instrument is a Russian bassoon — neither Russian nor a bassoon, but an upright form of the serpent, the bass cornett. Makers straightened the serpent's coils around 1800 for military use, and the bell was habitually carved and painted as a dragon's head with open jaws and a scarlet tongue. Innocenti has painted exactly that, rearing absurdly above the old man's head.
The joke is the point. By the 1880s the instrument was long obsolete, superseded by the ophicleide and tuba, and notorious for its coarse tone — a perfect comic prop for a gentleman amateur taking himself entirely seriously.
Innocenti was an Italian genre painter working through the second half of the nineteenth century, supplying the international cabinet-picture market that flourished in Italy from the 1860s onward. His clientele was largely British, German and American — visitors buying small, highly finished souvenirs of Italian life and Italian charm.
His subjects were the stock themes of that trade, handled with wit and a good deal of anecdotal detail: a duel breaking out in a tavern, two connoisseurs bent over a canvas in evident disagreement, a grand lady with a violin, a coquette, dancers in a landscape, a party resting in the summer countryside. Costume is often loosely historical — seventeenth- or eighteenth-century dress — which was the convention rather than any attempt at accuracy.
He worked in oil on panel or board at modest scale; one recorded example measures 32.5 × 40.5 cm. The handling is tight and controlled, with bright local colour and careful attention to fabric, glassware and interior furnishing.
He signed simply "Innocenti", usually lower right, occasionally initialling the reverse. One dated work carries 1891.
Around forty pictures are recorded at auction, mostly in Italy, Germany and Austria.
