One of the earliest expatriate artists to establish himself in the United States was Gerlando Marsiglia, a portrait, landscape, and history painter who was also active as an art dealer and restorer. According to an account of his life which appeared in the New York Biographical Record in 1886, Marsiglia became interested in painting during his youth. He initially worked independently, but through the arrangements made by a young nobleman who was impressed by his artistic ability, he entered the studio of Signor Patania in Palermo, the reputed "Raphael of Sicily." From there, Marsiglia went on to study at the Royal Academy in Naples, where he received a major award for history painting. This accomplishment led to his being decorated by King Fernando of Sardinia in March of 1810.
Marsiglia continued to work in Naples until 1818, when he went to France, and bearing the Fleur de Lis presented to him one year earlier by the French King, was presented at the court of Louis XVIII. He met Robert Barlow Fulton (1808-1840), the son of the American artist and inventor Robert Fulton, who had a strong interest in the fine arts. The younger Fulton invited Marsiglia to visit the United States and they sailed together from Italy in the spring of 1824.
Upon his arrival in America, Marsiglia resided in the Fulton home. He was thus afforded a special introduction to New York society, one that would eventually benefit him in his work as both an artist and dealer. It is thought that while living in the Fulton household, Marsiglia tutored his friend's sister, Julia Fulton Blight, ANA Elect.
It did not take Marsiglia long to integrate himself into the New York art world. In addition to painting portraits, landscapes and history subjects, he opened an art gallery at the corner of Reade Street and Broadway, in association with a Mr. Clark, displaying what he claimed to be his collection of Old Master paintings. Writing in 1875, T. B. Thorpe related how this "hero of the Old Masters" managed to fill "most of the best mansions of the city . . . with large canvases of saints, and gigantic fruit and flower pieces, from Holland." Thorpe also described an incident whereby Marsiglia cut up
a `Susanna and the Elders' into pieces, the `Susanna' of which finally appeared as a `Venus' by Rubens, and `The Edlers' as `Plato and Friends conversing in the Academic groves.'
Whatever Marsiglia's activities as a dealer might have been, he was obviously well-received by his contemporaries and played a lively role in the burgeoning art life of the city. He was a member of the New York Drawing Association in 1825 and in the following year, helped to found the National Academy. He exhibited in all the annual exhibitions between 1826 and 1842 and again in 1850. In addition, he submitted work to the exhibitions at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the Apollo Association, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He also worked as a book illustrator. His connections with New York society were further strengthened in 1837 when he married Eliza H. Ballentine Charruaud, a descendent of Sir George Carteret.
Despite his prolific output as an artist, only four of Marsiglia's paintings are now located. However, a substantial body of critical response to his work, largely through reviews of the Academy's annual exhihibitions and accounts written by such contemporaries as Thomas Cummings, indicates that Marsiglia favored brilliant colors and slick surfaces in his paintings. In his history of the Academy, for example, Cummings described Marsiglia as an artist of "much merit," whose paintings were "remarkably peculiar in style; and unlike anything other than themselves, they were glittering, even to a metallic lustre, in surface." Dunlap also noted this tendency, observing that Marsiglia's colors were applied "with great clearness and brilliancy [but] not always with harmony."
Marsiglia died of "paralysis" on September 10, 1850. He was remembered by Thomas Cummings as a "kind, good-natured man, [who] had few enemies and many friends." His art collection was sold in New York on December 12, 1850, by the firm of Henry H. Leeds.
