Amidei: 1934-2020

A Fascinating Story

Media

Amidei specialized in still-life paintings but also painted figures and locations. He used pastel, oil, watercolor, gouache, and collage and applied these to paper, canvas, and wood.

Amidei was the son of a wealthy middle-aged Egyptian businessman who ran a successful ships chandler business for luxury passenger vessels that traversed the Mediterranean Sea between Egypt and Italy. His mother was a young Italian woman, with the surname Amidei, who lived in Rome and worked as a server on the father’s ships. At the time of Amidei’s birth in 1934, his unwed Roman Catholic mother relinquished her parental rights to her son in return for the father’s agreement that their son be raised in Alexandria as a member of his Muslim family and that he be educated in a French school. He was given the Muslim name Ahmed and was taken into his father’s family…namely his father’s wife and his six half brothers and sisters. He enrolled in a French school and began taking lessons in the studio of a well-known artist in Alexandria, Silvio Bicchi, Jr.

Political life in Egypt changed when Ahmed was in his twenties. Gamal Abdel Nassar became president and caused an international stir when he nationalized the Suez Canal. Nasser followed with a decree nationalizing many private businesses, including the ships chandlery business of Ahmed’s father. His father and half brothers were imprisoned, and life became untenable for the family, including Ahmed. In 1962, he abandoned Alexandria for Rome, where he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. Once settled, he embarked on a search for his birth mother, Amidei, who he located in the outskirts of Rome. When he knocked on her door and identified himself, she informed him that she had abandoned him years before and did not recognize him as her offspring. Ahmed was devastated. When he recovered, he decided to dedicate himself to the memory of his mother by using her surname as his one-word professional name, which is inscribed, along with the year, on the corner of each of his works.

Amidei left Rome in 1966 and emigrated to England, where he settled in the Thames Valley town of Reading. There he mingled with university students and began his life as a professional artist. He frequented the parks and coffee houses. He painted nudes and street scenes and young people at leisure. Eventually, he became a naturalized citizen of Great Britain.

In the late 1970s, Amidei answered an advert for an assistant in the Castle Museum in Colchester, a garrison town north of London. He moved to Colchester and, with the help of an inheritance from his father, purchased a spacious Victorian house on the London Road. He painted in a conservatory bordered by an English garden. He rented out rooms to actors who performed in the local regional theatre. Many were the nights that a portly senior-citizen actor would come stumbling into Amidei’s house, singing bawdy songs after a post-performance visit to the local pub.

At the museum, he painted his magnum opus, a 4’x 8’ fresco-like graphic in gouache on paper, juxtaposing a design from an Etruscan tomb with five dancers from the Commedia dell’arte. He also produced the only work that paid homage to his early upbringing, namely a rendering of ancient Egyptian pottery, complete with full-frontal face and wavy handles.

Amidei was never more productive than in the days spent painting in his sun-drenched conservatory in the Colchester house. He painted some of his most romantic pastel still lifes there, often visiting the town’s outdoor market in the morning, purchasing fresh flowers and produce, and then bringing them home to paint them in pastel. Frequently, he placed the objects on a blanket with an elaborate motif, making for a “busy” but idiosyncratic background that adds to the depth and intricacy of his paintings.

Amidei befriended a musician in the Colchester regional orchestra and accompanied her to concerts, then painted watercolor depictions of orchestra members in coordinated movement.

Amidei spent many summers with an Italian patron and his family at their home in Milan, their farm in La Magna, their waterfront flat in Lerici, and an in-law’s house at Bonnières-sur-Seine in the French countryside. He prepared sketches of the sites that he brought back with him to complete in England.

Amidei visited a Chicago patron from time to time where he painted portraits and entertained Americans with his penchant for cooking and humor. He made friends wherever he went and grew fond of Chicago architecture and the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. He painted portraits and local scenes there.

Late in his career, he moved into collage using French, one of the many languages in which he was fluent. Amidei stopped painting in 2014 when his health began to decline. He relied on the care and friendship of an old friend who lived on the Isle of Wight. Amidei died in 2020 at the Foxburrow Grange in Colchester.