An Artist Flowering in Her Nineties
By Rebecca Mead
July 22, 2024
Isabella Ducrot, a painter in Rome, didn’t really pick up a brush until her fifties. Four decades later, galleries and museums throughout Europe are celebrating her work.
For more than two decades, Isabella Ducrot, an artist who was born in Naples in 1931, has lived in an apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, in the center of Rome. When I knocked on her door for the first time, this past spring, she greeted me with an emphatic pronouncement in English: “I must tell you immediately that I have never been so happy in my life!
It was a Tuesday evening in April, and I’d landed in Rome just a few hours earlier. Originally, Ducrot and I had arranged to meet for lunch the next day, but when she learned of my schedule she invited me to come over sooner, for a drink and a light dinner, noting in an e-mail that she “would be enchanted” to see me immediately. She opened the door to the apartment—where she lived with Vittorio (Vicky) Ducrot, her husband of fifty-eight years, until his death, in 2022—and I entered a spacious hallway densely hung with dark, dramatic Baroque paintings. Light shone on them from French doors that led to an expansive terrace. A side table held a vase of roses that were hovering on the edge between bloom and decay. Ducrot, who is tall and upright, grasped my hand more firmly than I would have expected, saying, “Please believe what I tell you. I adored my husband, and I am half a person now that he is not with me. But I am happy—happy.”
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