La Clementina by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo

On March 28, 2024, Cambi Auction House’s appointment dedicated to 19th- and 20th-century Paintings returns with numerous new works of art.

Among the most important works in the catalog, a painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, entitled “La Clementina,” stands out.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (Volpedo, July 28, 1868 – Volpedo, June 14, 1907) was an Italian painter, first a Divisionist, then an exponent of the social current, author of the very famous The Fourth Estate, which became a symbol of the workers’ question from the 19th century onward with the Second Industrial Revolution.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, La Clementina, oil on canvas, cm80x50

As Aurora Scotti, among the leading experts on Divisionism, indicates, La Clementina is a locality very close to Volpedo characterized by the presence of a farmstead that can be seen in the background on the left of the painting. The setting of the work is similar to the work ‘Novembre’ with a tree in the center of the view that spreads its branches to establish the upper end of the scene.

The theme of landscape was developed with particular commitment and interest by Pellizza in the early twentieth century after his trip to Paris for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, where he had carefully observed the ‘barbizonniers’ and after his visit to the 1901 Venice Biennial of Fontanesi’s works that prompted him to reconsider his commitment to the observation of nature in both drawings and paintings.

While in some cases the landscapes are linked to the rendering of particular effects of sunrises or sunsets, in the Clementine it is the large tree that dominates at the center, but it is a very different tree from the one studied in the painting “The Shepherds in Mongini’s Meadow” or in “The Roundabout.”

In the Clementine the theme is exclusively nature, which is embodied in the large tree under which a countryside unfolds in which we see, not dominant but reabsorbed in it, a house and a woman bent over in her work. What emerges is a vision that reabsorbs and charges nature with emotional and symbolic values. The technique is now far removed from the optical pointillism of the 1990s but is rich in subtle variations that translate perception into a state of mind.

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