Emilio Sommariva

After a few difficult years, Sommariva eventually established himself as a portraitist as well as an able documentator of other artists's work, including Umberto Boccioni, Aroldo Bonzagni, Carlo Carrà and Futurists like Gaetano Previati and Adolfo Wildt.

In 1922 he won the first prize at the International Exhibition of Professional Artistic Photography at the Royal Photographic Society in London.

During this period he painted numerous landscapes inspired by the foothills of the Alps in Lombardy and Piedmont where he spent many summers in a house in Lanzo d'Intelvi.

Sommariva's archives, documents and photographs were purchased from his heirs in 1979 and are now part of the Braidense Library at Palazzo Brera.

The collection includes 2,814 prints and about 50,000 negatives mostly on glass, as well as ten manuscripts, inventory papers, address books and other documents.