Federico Moja (Milan 1802 – Dolo 1885) – Music lesson in church.

Federico Moja (Milan 1802 – Dolo 1885) – Music lesson in church.

30 x 37 cm (without frame) – 42 x 51 cm (with frame).

Oil on canvas, in a carved and gilded wooden frame.

Work signed lower left: «Moja 1846».

Provenance: Dorotheum, Vienna, 29 April 2026, “19th Century Paintings”, lot 526 (estimate EUR 4.000 – 6.000).

Federico Moja is a central figure in 19th-century Lombard painting. He trained at Brera and worked in Italy and Northern Europe, where he developed a particular sensibility for architectural interiors and genre paintings. His work is influenced by the Flemish and Dutch schools, from which he assimilated their attention to light, the rendering of materials, and the discreet narration of everyday scenes.
The painting depicts a Flemish Gothic-style church interior, with nuns engaged in a musical rehearsal. In the center of the composition, a little girl in civilian clothes plays the violin under the guidance of a nun, while other nuns play the cello and double bass, reading from the same lectern. To the left, an elderly figure watches the scene with hands clasped in prayer, lending the composition a tone of recollected devotion. Light enters from above through a stained-glass window, softly reflecting on the dark robes and wooden draperies of the choir. The palette, dominated by warm browns and deep blacks, is enlivened by the little girl's colorful clothing, the focal point of the composition.
The date 1846 places the work in the artist's early maturity, when his language had achieved a solid balance between architectural documentary and sentimental narration, in line with the tastes of bourgeois collectors of the time.

Condition report: Original canvas. Good state of conservation of the pictorial surface.

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