He began to show his work at the Salon de Paris in 1872, traveling to the French capital on two separate occasions, and he also took part in the Exposition Universelle of 1878, where he was immensely successful. On his return to Naples he began to develop symptoms of a mental malaise which was to put him in a lunatic asylum for a few months, from late 1881 to February 1882. He moved back to Rome in 1883.

He travelled to England, Ireland and Germany in the first decade of the 20th century, painting several important portraits, chiefly for the local bourgeoisie. He also took part in some of the most significant events around the world, winning the Gold Medal at the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904 with his "Portrait of the Marchese Giorgio Capranica del Grillo" (National Gallery, London, on loan to the Hugh Lane Municipal Art Gallery, Dublin), while at the 1920 Venice Biennale – where he held a one-man show of his work – he achieved unprecedented success and every single one of his paintings was sold.

Mancini died in his home on the Aventine Hill in Rome in December 1930, while putting the finishing touches to his last paintings for the following year's edition of the Rome Quadriennale. The half-figure of an old man with a long white beard is calibrated totally towards the left of the canvas. The artist's free, rapid brushstrokes acquire greater texture and thickness, forming outright reliefs particularly in the lower part of the picture. The painted surface very clearly reveals traces of the "double grid," a bizarre method of painting from life which Mancini adopted from the mid-1880s on, and which consisted in placing a first strung frame before the model and a second frame of exactly the same size and with exactly the same string arrangement directly on the canvas. This allowed him to paint with a long paintbrush at a certain distance, square by square, as though in an

abstract work in which the whole composition only comes together at the end. The strings were not arranged only horizontally and vertically; sometimes they could also be arranged diagonally according to the areas that the artist wished to define.

 

In this painting the grid appears to be fairly regular, a fact which, when taken together with the style of the picture, suggests that it can be dated to the second half of the 1890s. The almost perfectly square forms are clearly visible, especially on the lower part of the painted surface, while we can perceive a number of diagonal lines towards the upper lefthand side of the picture. The old man with his intense gaze peering out from beneath thick eyebrows, his pointed nose and his long white beard seems to be the same model as the man in the Portrait of an Old Man Seated (private collection), which also presents a similarly tight grid and can also be dated to the late 1890s. Mancini may well have sought his inspiration for the theme of a man displaying a glass in the foreground of the painting from Frans Hals' celebrated picture of The Merry Drinker (1628, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). Hals was one of the old masters whom Mancini most admired and whose work he studied in detail. And it is precisely in the detail of the glass that Mancini achieves the loftiest result with his exceptional painting technique in this picture. The few strokes of light with which he marks the glass unbelievably "come together" to give the object its circular shape and all of its transparency when perceived from a distance.