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User Text: Called the Painter of San Francisco, Rinaldo Cuneo was born and raised in the city’s North Beach area. One of seven children, he came from a family of artists and musicians. Although his early paintings were influenced by Impressionism, his landscapes, city views, and still lifes grew more boldly reductive and modern as his career progressed.
At twenty, Cuneo enlisted in the Navy and saw action in the Spanish-American War. He returned to San Francisco in 1898 and worked for his family’s steamship ticket agency. He studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and then studied in London under his brother Cyrus, a well-known illustrator. He also took classes at the Académie Colarossi in Paris.
Cuneo returned to the Bay Area in 1913 and settled in San Anselmo, but later moved to a cottage on Telegraph Hill with a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay. From there, he painted cityscapes of San Francisco and its surroundings, which seemed to “express the soul of his own city.”1 He also traveled throughout California and painted many scenes of the Sierra in Inyo County. In the late 1920s, he added painted folding screens to his repertoire, and in the early 1930s produced many still lifes of fruit like this one. In 1934, he painted murals for Coit Tower under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project.
1Esther L. Johnson, “Paintings by Cuneo Catch Charm of S.F.,” San Francisco News, 12 Oct. 1928.