77/v Work of G. Segantini

THE WORK OF G. SEGANTINI. life> and that whicn his soul has felt he makes
BY BURNLEY BIBB. our souls fed.

Segantini was horn at Arco among the Trentine
The story of the painter Segantini's Alps, by the Lago di Garda. His father was of
life is the old story of genius breaking the bourgeoisie, his mother the descendant of an
the bonds of circumstance and fighting on with old nobilta di montagna, a hardy rare of farmers
face set steadfast to the goal. What is most rare and soldiers of fortune.

in it is the isolation in which his development has At the death of his mother, which happened in
been wrought out. his fifth year, the father took the child to Milan,

His first impulse towards art, coming entirely where he left him in charge of a step-sister, and
from within himself, was fostered solely by his disappeared, to be seen no more,
own striving, and finds its noble fruition far from The sister was poor and went out to work,
the schools, the coteries and critics, apart with leaving the little fellow shut up in a garret-room,
his only teacher, Nature, in the solitudes he has where he lived a wretched life for a couple of
ever sought. In the building up of his strong years, after which he ran away into the country, was
individuality extraneous influences have played taken in by kindly peasants, and became a little
small part. swineherd before he was quite seven.

Following no master, he has been himself, in so In these events of his lonely child-life, sketched
far as that be possible to
one of us born to the
inheritance of all art, and
his earnest eyes have
looked deep into the soul
of things. Beneath the
splendid skill with which
he renders light and sun-
shine one feels his sense
of the infinite.

The mountain folk of
his pictures are going about
their toil in the uncon-
scious grace of simple
beings, ennobled by the
dignity of life, labour
and love and sorrow ; the
herds at pasture, or hom-
ing to the pen, are painted
in the love and under-
standing of one who has
been himself a shepherd
of the flock; the moun-
tains are modelled with a
hand and heart that know
their grandeur, and in the
air about them one feels
the upland freshness.

These things he tells to
us as he has seen them.

No key is forced. If
they be mostly sad it is
becau se in the heart of the
man there is something
which thrills to the minor

™A**-.~. c ~f *U f portrait of g. segantini

cadences ot the song of
XL No. 53.—August, 1897.

BY HIMSELF
145