Giovanni Battista Crema was born in Ferrara, Italy in 1883 into a well-off family of solicitors. In order that the boy could follow in the footsteps of his family he was steered towards the study of Classics, however his father soon noticed the boy's love of painting and when he was fourteen he sent him for drawing lessons from the master Angelo Longanesi. After two years of lessons, at the age of sixteen, Crema decided to move to Naples to enroll at the Accademia di Belle Arti.

At the Academy he had Domenico Morelli as a teacher who, together with Filippo Palazzi, started what was called the southern Italian school of painting. They taught the study from nature as a means of transferring feelings onto canvas. However thi...