This section of landscape is beautifully lit up by the rendering of the sky: traces of colour that range from white to grey and blue are juxtaposed with vivid cerulean streaks, in keeping with Fontanesi’s exquisite method of representing the changing clouds and atmosphere. 

The years between 1874 and 1875 in Fontanesi’s biography correspond to his final visits to Morestel, in the Isère department in France, before departing for Japan, where he taught painting for several years during the Meiji period, introducing the European technique of oil painting to the Asian world. This painting, which Marziano Bernardi published for the first time in November 1945 in an article in the Turin-based magazine Agorà, dating it to “around 1875”,¹ must have been painted during this two-year period. This indication was taken up again by Angelo Dragone in 1977, when he included the painting in an exhibition he curated in Tokyo and then in Kyoto. 

Similar paintwork in one of the studies in the extensive collection at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin confirms it was painted between 1874 and 1875. This study is entitled Storm (inv. no. P/738), the initial idea for Imminent Storm, the masterpiece that Fontanesi exhibited in 1874 and that became part of the collection of Duke Tommaso of Savoy-Genoa. 

The two studies both share their free draughtsmanship, which experiments with colour effects, dragging the pigment across the surface with a dry brush to create rough, almost transparent movement. This section of landscape is beautifully lit up by the rendering of the sky: traces of colour that range from white to grey and blue are juxtaposed with vivid cerulean streaks, in keeping with Fontanesi’s exquisite method of representing the changing clouds and atmosphere. A synthetic and skilful summing up, rooted in his first large landscapes, such as October Morning (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea), which Fontanesi presented in Turin in 1862, producing a great reaction. According to Vincenzo Cabianca’s recollections, Cristiano Banti wanted to buy the painting in order to support the landscape artist whose international culture he admired so much and who the previous year, in 1861, had triumphed at the first Esposizione Nazionale in Ferrara.² 

The relationship of esteem and friendship that tied Fontanesi to Banti, Cabianca and Signorini dated to 1861, as did Federico Pastoris’s passionate defence in the Album of the Promotrice di Torino of Cabianca’s Morning, exhibited on that occasion. The shared aspiration for a profound renewal of painting united Fontanesi, the Macchiaioli and the young Piedmontese artists, including Pastoris, Vittorio Avondo and Ernesto Bertea. It was this ideal that inspired Pastoris’s lucid interpretation of Fontanesi’s painting in the Album of the Promotrice in 1864, commenting on his large picture Hautecombe. 

This long, fruitful acquaintance explains the decision made by Giovanni Camerana, who was a loyal friend to Fontanesi and the executor of his will, to dedicate the painting to Pastoris in memory of the master from Reggio Emilia, as testified by the words on the back of the card and signed by his initials. 

After a series of significant moves to different collections, the painting was sold on 22 December 1969 by the Galleria Narciso in Turin to Federico Cerruti, as documented by the statement kept among his papers. The presence in the collection of paintings by Fontanesi already at the end of the 1960s testifies to Cerruti’s interest in 19th-century Italian painting in the first phase of his collecting activity. 

Virginia Bertone

¹ Bernardi 1945, pp. 17-18.

² See V. Bertone, “‘Il primo dei paesisti’: Fontanesi e la novità del suo paesaggio nei ricordi di Banti, Signorini e Cabianca”, in Turin 2018-19b, pp. 65-75.