Washerwomen, their washing hanging out in the sun, young ladies dressed up in their Sunday best, balloons that are flying away, streets full of passers-by, the popular masses and the bourgeoisie, whose clothes lend colour to the dreary days of a snow-bedecked Milan criss-crossed by carriages and trams.
These are the subjects that are found time and again in the works of the Lombard artists who concentrated on portraying life in the city. Reviving one of the motifs typical of Romantic era painting – views of the city populated and animated by its typical characters – their work was extremely successful, as there was much demand for it in the market.
This was a world that the artists knew personally: when Segantini painted his views of the Naviglio canal in Milan, for example, his studio was actually located right on the celebrated canal of San Marco. So we can imagine that the artist could look out of the window, see a familiar landscape and decide to paint it, fascinated by the possibilities offered to him as a painter by the bodies of water that reflected the sunlight, the blue of the sky and the ever-changing world of people and things who made their away along the bank known as the Ripa. In the hands of the artist, every element was transformed into a symphony of light and colours.
What Segantini saw was an impermanent reality, one that was constantly changing and quite unlike the tranquil slowness of the countryside and the mountains: to capture it, artists would use rapid, synthetic brushstrokes. Spots of colour, broad brushstrokes of pure colours, contrasts of light and shade would fix the canvas with images of washerwomen busy washing clothes and hanging them out, while a teeming of brightly coloured brushstrokes would flood the canvases painted by Gola and Segantini, suggesting the way that the light would flicker as it bounced off the water.
In his masterful Darsena, Mosè Bianchi succeeded in rendering not just the image of the busy city dockyard at twilight, but also all the atmospheric truth of a day in the middle of autumn, when the air grows damp and blankets everything.
The cobbled streets covered with snow flattened by both pedestrians and carriages and the nocturnal effects of a city illuminated by artificial lighting are also rendered with the same immediacy and fidelity to the truth.