Lot 31: * Angelo Morbelli (Italian, 1853-1919) Paesaggio con larici

* Angelo Morbelli (Italian, 1853-1919) Paesaggio con larici
Paesaggio con larici
signed and dated 'Morbelli.1917.' (lower left)
oil on canvas
50.5 x 80cm (19 7/8 x 31 1/2in).

Footnotes

• We are grateful to Professor Giovanni Anzani and Elisabetta Chiodini for confirming the attribution to Angelo Morbelli on the basis of photographs, and for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.
  
  Provenance
  Private collection, South America, by the early 1920s.
  
  The present lot is an interesting new discovery; not recorded as having been exhibited during the artist's lifetime, the work has been in the same South American collection since the early 1920s.
  
  Although Morbelli experimented with mountain scenes in the 1880s and 1890s, it was in the early years of the 20th century that the mountain landscape became a regular motif for the artist, producing works painted in Valtellina and Valfurva- places that the artist visited for health reasons- and at the Val d'Usseglio in the Piedmont region, a likely location for the present lot.
  
  As with many of Morbelli's mountain scenes, here the artist closes the perspective, presenting the mountains from a high vantage point, rather than capturing them in a wide panorama. This technique is used to good effect in a number of Morbelli's works from this period, such as Tramonto sulla Lera (1919), Alta montagna (1912, fig. 1), and Il ghiacciaio dei Forni an especially unusual mountain scene, painted in an oval with the line of snow running diagonally across the composition.
  
  The present lot richly demonstrates Morbelli's skill in using the divisionist technique to full effect- albeit a less restrained and calculated divisionist language- the lines of colour placed beside each other to enrich the texture of the work and provide a greater sense of depth.