Working the Land

The work is from the collection of Alberto Grubicy, whose brother Vittore was a painter and art dealer as well as Segantini’s main patron. Alberto showed it in 1899, a few months after the painter’s premature death, together with others in his collection and those of the heirs, in the exhibition mounted by the Milan Società per le Belle Arti ed Esposizione Permanente. The cartoon later entered the collection of Giuseppe Benzoni in Milan, which was auctioned in separate lots in 1926, the year in which the work appeared in the show of the painter’s work held in Venice within the framework of the 15th Esposizione Internazionale della Città di Venezia. Executed in charcoal and white lead, it depicts the same subject as another drawing, smaller in size but pictorially defined in every detail, exhibited in 1888 and now in a private collection in Switzerland. The larger format of the work in the Cariplo Collection, the quick, clean lines, which almost suggest a tracing, and the technique itself all support the hypothesis that Segantini produced or used it as a cartoon or preparatory drawing for a work on a larger scale, which may never have been executed. Both drawings belong to the series of studies of agricultural labour carried out at Savognino, a town in the canton of Grisons, where Segantini had been enabled to move with his family in 1886 by financial support from Vittore Grubicy. It was there that he first embarked on the experiments with Divisionism that led to his painting The Two Mothers, 1889, Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna).