Winter in Liguria

La Thangue had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1880s, where he absorbed both the formal discipline of Academic Realism and the emerging lessons of open-air painting he found in Brittany alongside Stanhope Forbes and other future Newlyn painters. By the mid-1890s, however, he had grown restless with the grey light of northern France and the English countryside, and he began making extended winter campaigns in the Italian Riviera, particularly around Liguria. The region offered him brilliant light, inexpensive models accustomed to outdoor labour, and architectural settings of weathered stone and plaster that suited his interest in honest working life. Winter in Liguria belongs to a sequence of ambitious Ligurian canvases he exhibited at the Royal Academy and the New Gallery in London during the first decade of the twentieth century, works that the critic D. S. MacColl praised for uniting the colour ambition of the French Impressionists with an English moral seriousness about rural labour. The painting's warm luminosity and its attention to the small dignities of a country girl's daily work place it at the high point of this Italian period, when La Thangue was considered one of the foremost British outdoor painters of his generation.