November

Antonio Fontanesi’s November doesn’t really depict a place so much as a mood that happens to have trees in it. The place depicted here is Tortu motif’ a location near Crèmieu in France as mentioned by Fontanesi in one of his letter. The countryside is barely specific at all, more a stand-in for every late-autumn field there’s ever been, and that vagueness is doing a lot of work. Time seems to have stopped somewhere in the picture. Nothing much happens, and that’s sort of the point. A peasant woman sits near the edge of a wood, turned inward, not really looking at anything. She isn’t posed for an audience. Some animal grazes nearby, more atmosphere than incident, and the trees have already given up most of their leaves. The hills behind just dissolve, and that soft fade does about as much emotional work as the woman herself. What’s odd, and what makes the painting hold up, is that it isn’t really recording a season so much as using the landscape as a kind of mood ring. Nature here reads as a mixture of contemplation, a little sadness and nostalgia in a way that cannot be explained on its own. There’s a caressing, almost silvery vaporousness to the light, the kind of atmosphere that seems to hang rather than fall across the field. It’s easy to walk past a painting like this. Nothing in it announces itself. But that restraint is the whole achievement, a landscape that says almost nothing directly and somehow gets across everything about memory, time passing, and the particular ache of a season ending.