Girl Knitting in Savognin
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland |
| Location History: | The painting has been consistently held at the Kunsthaus Zürich, which remains its primary institutional home today. A related preparatory pencil study of the girl's head has passed through a separate private-collection provenance from the collection of Count Ottaviano Venier in Italy, to a private Milan collection acquired directly from that source, and by descent to its current owner and was authenticated by Segantini scholar Annie-Paul Quinsac after direct examination of the original. |
A young woman is bending over, engrossed in the tiny task at hand, knitting with her hands, while behind her the slats of a wooden fence frame in a narrow landscape view of the Swiss village of Savognin, also knotted into a narrow strip of landscape that establishes the visual rhythm of the whole scene. The model for this work, Barbara "Baba" Uffer, was the young family maid who became Segantini's preferred subject in a number of his great paintings of this era, and the presence of this figure imparts a singular intimacy to the picture: not an anonymous peasant type, but a fairly specific one that Segantini used again and again, whom he knew well. The painting is from the period art historians refer to as Segantini's artistic coming-of-age, two years after he had moved his family to Savognin, where they lived in a house that the artist himself designed, to escape the cost of living in New York and the urban scene he had abandoned. The canvas is technically an early and accomplished example of Segantini's development of Divisionism, in which he divided the color into an infinite series of small separate touches or paint flecks, creating a subtle vibration of light, even in a scene composed around the absolute stillness. Surviving preparatory material, including a signed pencil study of the girl's head in a private collection, serves to dispel the impression that Segantini was handling this small quiet subject lightly, as if it were a snap from life.
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