Alan Feltus, born in Washington DC, is a figurative painter of contemporary classicism, which is rooted iconically in artwork of the Italian Renaissance but has a timeless, melancholy aspect related to Modernism. However, his fascination with the Italian Old Masters and the culture of Italy, inspired him in 1987 to buy a farm near Assisi, Italy and became a full-time resident.

His figure subjects, often depicted in pairs in interior settings, usually have dark hair, simple clothing, "downturned mouths and sideways glances" with limbs that are "almost sculpturally smooth and characteristically bent into intriguing puzzlelike patterns. . . . unspecified narratives hover in the air, and the inhabitants seem los...