Midday in the Alps (Mezzogiorno sulle Alpi)

Segantini painted this work in 1891, the period now recognised as the peak of his mature Divisionist practice, when he was living at Savognin in the Graubünden canton of Switzerland. Having taught himself to paint with no formal academic training, he had spent the 1880s searching for a technique that could render the specific quality of Alpine light at altitude, where ultraviolet is unfiltered and shadows carry colour instead of weight. His discovery of the optical writings of Ogden Rood and the example of French Neo-Impressionism gave him the systematic method his eye demanded. Mezzogiorno sulle Alpi was exhibited at the 1891 Esposizione Triennale di Brera in Milan, where it drew wide critical attention and cemented Segantini's standing as the foremost Italian painter working outside the academic tradition. The work entered the collection of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, where it remains. It belongs to a sustained series in which Segantini mapped the rhythms of pastoral labour against the Alpine sublime, finding in shepherdesses, spinning women and milkmaids an unheroic dignity that his Divisionist touch amplified into something close to the monumental.