Apple-trees in blossom

We do not know where this picture was painted, although, in the exhibition of Silva Porto’s works, held in 1894, in the year following his unexpected death, it was considered to be "unfinished". It is hard to understand why, since, although it is not signed (like so many others sold on that occasion), it is a complete record of the captivating motif that attracted the painter, displaying the best of his style: the rapid and loose brushstrokes, the organic articulation between the ground and the sky, and the taste for recreating scrub vegetation, growing close to the ground, in palpable patches that use colour in a resonant fashion, briefly interrupted by dots of red. In the middle ground, moved slightly to the left of the composition’s centre, the figure of the tree appears as a more intense volume, but even so it is a body that is open to its inclusion in the surrounding atmosphere. Around it are other less imperious trees, which establish a rhythmic distance made vertical through the clear game of clouds.
The painting of an impression, based upon a particular motif, it evokes Silva Porto’s faithful adherence to the naturalist aesthetics that remained unaware of some of the knowledge that had been acquired through impressionism, appropriating reality through the autonomy of the pictorial work, and thus generating another reality: a kind of poetry made of colour and light.          
Raquel Henriques da Silva