Landscape

The painting shows a stretch of Tuscany countryside with a hill covered in olive trees and a farmhouse perched on top. The natural elements and buildings are captured in rich brushstrokes that tend to mark out surfaces rather than pinpoint details. It presents the key characteristics of Ottone Rosai’s painting in the early 1920s, when he worked with Ardengo Soffici at Poggio a Caiano. The two artists had a great deal in common at the time. They met in November 1914 on the occasion of the show organised in Florence by the magazine Lacerba, which prompted the Florentine artist to embrace Futurism. Subsequently, in the years of the “return to order”, he began to paint timeless scenes of unpaved roads winding their way through hilly countryside. The element of Primitivism emerging in these works can also be discerned in the paintings of Carlo Carrà. As is also evident in the work of artists associated at the time with the Novecento Italiano movement, such as Cesare Monti (Corenno Plinio – Lago di Como) and Arturo Tosi (The Seriana Valley), this landscape demonstrates the crucial influence of Cézanne’s work, which Rosai examined on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition held in Venice at the 12th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia in 1920. The artist had in fact begun to organise his compositions by means of volumes developed through the use of colour. After World War II, he began to specialise in images of an increasingly simplified and conventional nature, as exemplified by the landscape of 1949 in the Cariplo Collection.