A Man Cutting Tobacco

Mattia Preti (1613-1699) was a Calabrian painter known for the dramatic chiaroscuro and muscular figure style that he developed under the influence of Caravaggio and the Neapolitan Baroque. A Man Cutting Tobacco from the 1660s depicts a man cutting tobacco in the dramatic chiaroscuro and muscular figure style that distinguishes Preti's best genre subjects from his more familiar religious paintings. The 1660s date places this in Preti's most productive period, when he was working in Malta and producing both the religious paintings that are his most familiar works and the genre subjects that show his Caravaggist manner in a more everyday mode.

A Man Cutting Tobacco is important in Preti's oeuvre because it demonstrates the Caravaggist chiaroscuro and muscular figure style that he typically applied to religious subjects, in the more everyday mode of a genre subject. The tobacco cutter shows Preti applying the dramatic chiaroscuro and muscular figure style of the Neapolitan Baroque to a homely subject that is more familiar from Dutch genre painting, creating a type of Southern genre painting that is simultaneously dramatic in manner and everyday in subject.

A Man Cutting Tobacco is Preti's Caravaggist genre: a man cutting tobacco rendered in the dramatic chiaroscuro and muscular figure style that he typically reserved for religious subjects. The 1660s painting applies the Neapolitan Baroque manner to an everyday genre subject, creating a dramatic Southern genre painting.