Studio: international art (32.1904)

Giovanni Segantini

contumely and derision which, as frequently powerful works, which fascinate us by their simple
happens to innovators like himself, raged furiously naturalism and genuine intensity of feeling. Among
against Segantini in his own country during his these I will enumerate : Ave Maria at Trasbordo,
lifetime ; and it has at last been realised that in him Two Mothers, One More, Moonlight Effect, A Kiss,
has disappeared not only the most strenuous, most At the Spinning- Wheel, In the Sheep/old, and, above
original, and most daring representative of the new all, At the Tether, which, seen again to-day at the
forces at work in modern Italian art, but also (as National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, makes
has been justly affirmed by the clear-sighted German itself felt as one of the most masterly achievements
critic William Bitter), one who, like Watts, Puvis in Italian painting during the last twenty years,
de Chavannes, and Bocklin, is a shining light of Looking on these canvases of Segantini, how far
pictorial art in contemporary Europe. removed we feel ourselves, both from the agreeable

Although when he died Giovanni Segantini had frivolities of the conventional landscape painter,
barely entered his forties (having been born at Arco and from the minute but superficial exactitude of
in the Tyrol on 15 January, 1858), the result of his detail favoured by photographic landscapists ! The
labour is very extensive, comprising no less than painter of Arco has contrived, like Millet (with
200 works—oil paintings, drawings in pastel, in whom in this second period of his artistic career he
sepia, and in crayon. But besides being abundant, betrays a spiritual relationship), to make us com-
his work, which in every form bears the unmistak- prehend in a marvellous manner all the austere and
able stamp of originality, possesses the great merit simple poetry of a peasant's laborious life, surrounded
of being very widely diversified ; so much so that by his oxen, his cows, his woolly flocks of sheep ;
the products of his brush and pencil may well be he has enabled us to appreciate the majestic dig-
subdivided into four great categories, corresponding nity of the fields, with their brown clods of earth
to four successive develop-
ments of his versatile and
profound creative genius.

At the outset Segantini
conceived and executed
a series of genre pictures
and pictures with romantic
subjects, which represent
a first stage of artistic in-
decision : pictures from
which it would appear that
he did not as yet quite
know what he wanted to
do; that he had not yet
found his way; but in
which he already mani-
fests an unusual efficiency
of pictorial vision, and
makes the first, half-un-
conscious, attempts at that
divisionist method which
he was afterwards to apply
with such resolute hardi-
hood in his later works.

And then, at length,
attracted by the life of the
humble, and enamoured
of the wide, majestic,
melancholy plains of Lom-
bardy, he found a definite
note of originality, and
produced a number of portrait of himself by giovanni segantini

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