Spring in the Alps

Segantini painted this large-format work in 1897 while living in the Engadine valley near Maloja in the Swiss Alps, the final chapter of a career spent ascending to ever-higher altitudes in search of a light he described as unlike anything found in the lowlands. By the mid-1890s he had fully committed to the Divisionist method promoted by the Italian theorist Gaetano Previati, using optically separated strokes of unmixed pigment to approximate the shimmering luminosity of high mountain air. Spring in the Alps belongs to Segantini's mature alpine cycle, a sustained body of work documenting peasant labour and the seasonal rhythms of life above the treeline, and it was exhibited to considerable acclaim at the Vienna Secession and at international expositions during the years around 1900. Segantini was closely associated with the Symbolist current in European art, and though the scene is grounded in observed rural reality, the panoramic scale and the quality of attention lavished on light and atmosphere transform it into something closer to Symbolism: the working woman and her horses become near-mythic figures of endurance set against an indifferent immensity. His death in 1899, just two years after completing this painting, cut short a career at its absolute peak and made works like this one among his most studied and reproduced.