Alpine Pasture

Segantini painted this work during the years he spent in the Engadin valley of the Swiss Alps, the period that defined his mature reputation. Having moved progressively higher into the mountains throughout the 1880s, he settled at Savognin and later Maloja, pursuing an almost spiritual identification with the alpine world. The Divisionism he developed was independent of and contemporaneous with the French Neo-Impressionism of Seurat and Signac, though Segantini arrived at his separated-stroke technique through a study of chromatic theory combined with an intensely personal need to render the quality of high-altitude light: thin, shadowless, almost sourceless, reaching every surface equally. Alpine Pasture belongs to a sequence of large pastoral compositions in which the shepherd and the flock serve as figures of contemplative solitude rather than of labour, and it demonstrates why critics of the 1890s placed Segantini at the centre of European Symbolist and Divisionist debate. His work was celebrated at major international exhibitions in Munich, Vienna and Paris, and he remains the pre-eminent painter of the alpine landscape in the history of Western art.