Bagpipers of Brianza

Brianza is located in the north of Italy along the border of Switzerland. It is thought that this work was created during the period when Segantini moved from Milan in 1881 to a town on the shores of Lake Como. Three farm wives and an infant in a stroller listen to two men playing the bagpipes as a hen with several chicks walk by on the earthen ground and a cow eats its fodder in the back right of the composition. The artist was particularly familiar with and frequently depicted the scenes of daily life and nature in the Alpine areas of the Tyrol. Here we can see his realist methods and the detailed brushwork of his later years which reveal an absence of an Impressionist use of light. The scholar researching Segantini, A.-P. Quinsac dates the production of this painting to the period 1883-1885. (Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no. 98)