The morning
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Wolfsoniana / Musei di Genova, part of the Frugone Collections (Raccolte Frugone), Genoa, Italy |
| Location History: | The painting was acquired into Luigi Frugone's private collection in 1925, reportedly purchased from a Signora Campeggi through the mediation of the dealer Ferruccio Stefani, who was also entrusted with commissioning the work's elaborate Sienese frame. It passed into the public collection as part of Frugone's bequest to the city of Genoa in 1953, and remains part of the Raccolte Frugone today, catalogued under inventory number GAM1539. |
The scene is a peaceful one, with a single peasant girl sitting in a field of light, her figure poised delicately between the vegetation and the sky, as if suspended in time and space.The overall scene is a serene and tranquil one, with the peasant girl sitting in the midst of the fields and the light that surrounds her. This combination of one man and a surrounding nature is used throughout Fontanesi's work and here takes a very mature form: the woman is not used as a story subject, but rather as an element of the atmosphere, and thus her mood and the surrounding nature are felt together as a whole, rather than as a figure on a background. The debt owed to French landscape painting is very evident — Fontanesi had visited Paris on a few occasions around the 1855 Universal Exhibition, and his treatment of the morning field here is very reminiscent of the effects which he investigated in a similarly themed rural scene exhibited at the 1855 Universal Exhibition, and to which he owed so much from the painters Constant Troyon, Camille Corot, and Charles-François Daubigny. As important as the painting is the story of its acquisition: Luigi Frugone, the Genoa collector, traded off some other paintings in his collection to obtain this one, and after its acquisition, commissioned from his trusted dealer Ferruccio Stefani the creation of a special frame in Siena, where the collection was prized for its rural figure studies.
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