Lola Costa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carola "Lola" Costa (England, 1903 – Florence, 2004) was an English painter, writer and poet. She was born in England to a Ligurian father and an Anglo-French mother, Marie Antoinette Lesieur, with whom she shared artistic interests.[1] Costa’s works often feature still lifes, everyday scenes, or portraits of family members, neighbors, and rural laborers.
In the early 1920s, Costa left London to live with her mother in France, where her artistic career took off (2). She married Federigo Angeli, who was also a painter. The pair purchased Villa Il Palmerino in Florence in 1935 (2). Costa worked and resided there during the height of her career, from 1936 to 1948, and would live at Villa Il Palmerino for 70 years.[1]
Costa's famous works include Portovenere, Portrait of Ornella, and Il Palmerino.[1],2) Today, her works can be found in private collections and the Pitti Palace (Florence) in the Modern Art Gallery collection,[1] There have been several recent exhibitions of her work: ‘il Palmerino’ in 2014, and ‘Ritorno in casa, a return to home, Lola Costa at Il Palmerino,’ in 2024 (3).
Although Lola Costa was born in England in 1903, her parents were not native Britons. Her father was a Ligurian businessman, descended from the counts 'Costa di Carmagnola', and her French mother grew up in Normandy. When her parents separated in the early 1920s, Costa accompanied her mother to Paris, where they lived in relative poverty, heavily reliant on her mother's aristocratic friends, to whom Lola often sold paintings. Costa spent much of her time painting the streets and writing in her diary while working as a shop assistant, until she was taken to Egypt by a French actress, who made her her companion and lady-in-waiting. Costa arrived in Florence at the end of the 1920s after teaching English in Milan with the Berlitz school.[2]
Personal life and relationships
Costa transferred to the Berlitz Florentine branch and became a private tutor. She began tutoring the Tuscan artist Federigo Angeli, soon becoming his muse, and then married in 1932. The couple moved to the watch tower turned Villa il Palmerino, which once belonged to another English adoptive Florentine, the writer Vernon Lee. Costa took the Tuscan landscape surrounding the Villa, which was to be her home until her death, as one of her favourite subjects and frequent settings to her paintings of family and friends.
Costa and her husband swiftly became immersed in the Florentine artistic milieu; among her friends was Elisabeth Chaplin, another English expatriate artist living in Florence,[3] as well as the Spanish-born avant-garde painters Antonio and Xavier Bueno.
She remained in Italy for the rest of her long life.
