Studio: international art (11.1897)

The Work of G. Segantini

toil, choosing the nobler, albeit the sadder, side of
their existence.

Another Tyrolean, the peasant and painter
Defregger, has idealised them. He is a roman-
ticist, Segantini a realist. "Defregger's creations,"
says Haack, " are full of the real German feeling
of the old German masters. Segantini has that
cool reserve in art which distinguished the old
Italians, and which sets him apart from his con-
temporaries."

For my part I find little of the formalism
of the great Italians in Segantini, but rather warm
humanity, throbbing life.

His art is virile but pure; never sensuous. Yet
it is perfectly modern, and he has nothing to learn
from the new schools. He is serious and reserved.
His conceptions are "like the epic songs of a
young nation," says Haack. And, indeed, there is
in them the freshness and the melancholy of the
genuine Volkslied. His peculiar technique has plas-
ticity in a marked degree. The colours, squeezed
out thick, and laid one beside the other, give to
some parts of the canvas a tapestry or mosaic
effect.

This is very strong in the foreground of Plough-
ing in the Engadine, sl large painting owned by the

I52

Royal Pinakothek of Bavaria, and exhibited with
other canvases and drawings by Segantini in
last summer's excellent salon of the " Secession"
in Munich. The crystal atmosphere of this
picture; the depth and distance across the broad
valley to the mountains ; the splendid rendering of
these in scarp and slope and snowy peak; the
plastic modelling and perfect detail of the central
group; the depth of sentiment throughout the
composition; are the work of entire understanding
and mastery.

In the twilight sky of his pastoral the Heavy
Hours, the effect of pulsing colour, of light in
motion, is wonderfully rendered, in his peculiar
method, by the colours of the solar spectrum, laid
on in flecks of paint which melt together in the
eye and give the glimmer of the evening air. The
head of the woman against the sky in bold relief,
and the drooping pose, suggest a melancholy reverie.
The lowing cow, the answering calf, pushed by a
shepherd toward the fold, the herd gathering in for
the night and calling to one another as they do at
evening, are eloquent of the sad monotony of the
upland shepherd's life, and are surely the work of a
great animal painter. The shadows of the falling
night, the grey shadows of human fate, are stealing