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Matteo Sandonà and Hawai‘i: A Capital Ambition is the first significant exhibition of work by Matteo Sandonà (1881-1964) in more than fifty years. Already a highly skilled draftsman in his teens, Sandonà emigrated with his family to the United States in the early 1890s and settled in San Francisco. In 1901 he cofounded the California Society of Artists and quickly became known for his sophisticated portraits characterized by a synthesis of virtuosic, almost gestural paint handling and exquisitely detailed draftsmanship. Like his elder compatriot Giovanni Boldini and the American painter John Singer Sargent, Sandonà evoked the Grand Manner painterliness of the Baroque period with his thickly impastoed paintings and luxurious, velvety pastel drawings. The genre of portraiture, virtually personified by Boldini and Sargent as well as James Abbott McNeill Whistler at the turn-of-the-century, was Sandonà’s preferred milieu. Even though the genre itself existed at the periphery of modernism, its inherent psychological tension between subject and viewer would later become an acutely modern concern, and one that interested Sandonà early in his career.