At 94, Isabella Ducrot Is Gaining Overdue Recognition for Her Tender Paintings

Isabella Ducrot turned 94 this year, and she hasn’t let age interrupt her daily ritual of painting. Every day she walks from her Rome apartment atop the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj to a quiet studio tucked behind a colonnaded courtyard. After writing in the morning, she spends her day painting on Japanese paper with a brush tied to a stick, often closing her eyes and allowing the line to move freely, creating what she calls a “tender image.” “I almost close my eyes, and let the hand go,” she said in an interview with Artsy. “The result that comes out is a representation of that particular experience: ‘tenderness.’”

Ducrot has become one of the art world’s most beloved late bloomers—only beginning to make art seriously in her fifties and finding international recognition in the past two years. Her paintings are light-filled, lyrical compositions, featuring motifs like flowers, grids, and entwined figures. Often stitched with old textiles or fragments of handwriting, they feel both fragile and emotionally resonant. In July 2024, the Consortium Museum in Dijon mounted her first solo museum exhibition outside of Italy, and dealers like Sadie Coles in London and Petzel Gallery in New York mounted solo shows that drew attention to her soft, collage-based compositions. Her work even appeared alongside Dior’s spring/summer 2024 collection.

Her age hasn’t slowed her down. If anything, it has sharpened her sense of urgency and delight. At Petzel’s Chelsea gallery, Ducrot is presenting a new body of works in “Visited Lands,” including eight large-scale paintings of ethereal landscapes that use pigment ground from meteorites on her favorite Gampi paper. The exhibition also features her “Profusion” (year) series of floral still-lifes. “The Japanese paper I used is very symbolic; it looks very frail, but in reality, it is strong,” she said. “Let’s hope that our bella terra [“beautiful land”] should have similar qualities to the marvelous Gampi paper.”

Ducrot’s life story proves the maxim that it’s never too late. The artist herself is a model of persistence. Over the past four decades, Ducrot has created a body of work that invites us to examine the world more closely: how it moves, recurs, and affects us. That sustained attention, without recognition, takes nerve. “Courage has been a kind of trance,” she said. “I transformed things, and the things were mostly textiles, and textiles were interesting.” It was only through that slow, deliberate transformation—of materials and of herself—that she came to a realization: “The result was that I had to admit to being an artist.”

Ducrot was born in Naples in 1931 and spent her childhood in a city shaped by the chaos of World War II. During the Fascist era, before Allied bombings tore through the city, she lived in a palazzo with her family—her father, a lawyer, and her mother, a stylish and enigmatic figure. When the bombs came, they fled to nearby Sorrento and lived in the servants’ quarters of a villa owned by an exiled Russian princess. Reflecting on her wartime experiences, Ducrot explained, “Generally speaking, we Neapolitans live as we will die one day”—not recklessly, but with the understanding that life is always lived in the shadow of its eventual end. “The brutality of life’s style was my university,” she said.

As a teenager, Ducrot was diagnosed with tuberculosis. In midcentury Naples, the illness was both feared and stigmatized, and she was kept from many of the social rites of girlhood—dancing, swimming, flirtation. For nearly eight years, she lived with the illness as a secret, immersing herself in books and solitude. “Tuberculosis has been a medium for an experience that changed my destiny,” she recalled, noting that it “forced a different routine: rest, solitude, and books.”

Ducrot moved to Rome in her early thirties, seeking a new life. There, she married Vicky Ducrot, a worldly and pragmatic man. With him, she traveled across India, China, Laos, and Yemen, where she collected antique textiles.

“The familiarity with silks, cotton, woolen pieces offered me a kind of knowledge, a dictionary, a grammar to understand the quality and preciousness of old textiles,” said Ducrot. “The markets of the Eastern countries of the world offered an incredible opportunity to learn more and more.”

After years of collecting textiles, Ducrot was encouraged to pursue creative endeavors by friends like Italian artists Tatiana Franchetti and Giosetta Fioroni. Ducrot’s first large-scale painting came in her fifties: a loose, expressive ink drawing of two reclining lovers, dashed off on an enormous piece of Chinese paper. “I had received a very, very large sheet of Chinese paper, for the first time, and I felt that the sheet required an appropriately large gesture,” she told Artsy. “In a few minutes, I realized the drawing: surprise, satisfaction, joy.”

Ducrot’s materials are modest but specific. Gampi paper, long used to preserve manuscripts, is what she uses for most works, selected for its deceptive delicacy and tensile strength. Onto it she applies swaths of ink, watercolor, and sometimes pigment from pulverized meteorites. Her colors are soft but precise: saffron yellows, moss greens, rust reds.

Repetition, for Ducrot, is part of her practice. “A kind of familiarity with the same subject is very strong in me—I enjoy fixed habits and I love repetition,” she said. This is evident in her numerous series. For instance, her “Profusion” series features several still lifes of vases exploding with colorful flower arrangements. Meanwhile, her “Tendernesses” series, 11 of which were presented at the Consortium Museum, all feature the same motif: two figures embracing.

“Repetition can change the quality of a drawing, the substance of a speech, the charm of music,” she said. “I think of repetition as a powerful kind of meditation, a strong medium in religious and poetic and decorative ‘oeuvres d’art.’”

Through this motif of two intimate figures, Ducrot’s “Tendernesses” distills her ideas about sensuality and human connection. “Tenderness is a much more rare and mysterious way to express the need we have to relate with others,” she said. “I strongly feel that tenderness and erotism are two very different ways of expressing our need to be touched by somebody. In a way, when I approach with a long stick, [it’s] with the intention to represent a tender image,” she added.

Three years ago, Ducrot’s husband died. Her newfound solitude has shaped a new chapter in her work. While her “Bella Terra” works depicted sweeping, idyllic landscapes, her newest paintings tilt skyward. These “Visited Lands” works reference their materials, literal fragments of meteorites.