Novembre belongs to one of the artist’s qualitatively finest phases and displays his particular predilection for landscape, a genre explored assiduously all through his career. 

Described as a “sort of playful selfportrait” ¹ by the artist himself, Novembre was painted at Miazzina, a town in the mountains of the province of Verbano overlooking Lake Maggiore, where he spent a great deal of time between 1892 and 1898. 

An art dealer, critic and painter, Vittore Grubicy de Dragon developed his taste through journeys all over Europe, visiting Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and above all the Netherlands, where he came into close contact with the artists of the Hague school and especially the painter Anton Mauve. He became the greatest champion in Italy of Divisionism and pittura ideista or painting as the expression of ideas, not least through a stream of articles in national newspapers and magazines. 

Novembre belongs to one of the artist’s qualitatively finest phases and displays his particular predilection for landscape, a genre explored assiduously all through his career. In depicting the natural world, Grubicy reflects deeply on the mountainous setting, influenced not only by the established Western tradition but also by the Japanese art known since the mid-1870s.² 

In the works of this period, the vision of the landscape is developed in accordance with an intuitive principle that rejects any kind of objective transcription of the natural subject, an emotive approach echoed in his critical writings. It was precisely in 1896 that Grubicy asserted the importance in art of “suggestion”, understood as a phenomenon capable of involving both the artist and the viewer through a synaesthetic interweaving of images and emotions.³ 

As indicated by the autograph label on the back, the painting was a gift from Grubicy to the sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi (addressed as “dear friend and deeply admired brother in art”), a friend since the second half of the 1880s. In this period, the two artists shared the same convictions as to the need for renewal of the arts in Italy as well as a passion for the landscapes of Antonio Fontanesi, in whose posthumous rediscovery they both played a part.⁴ A preparatory study in pencil (fig. 1) dated 1896 bears a note at the bottom indicating the that the finished painting Novembre was the property of the sculptor.⁵ 

Around 1912, in accordance with his common practice at the time, Grubicy asked Bistolfi to let him have the painting back for a short period in order to rework it.⁶ 

After Bistolfi’s death, Novembre became part of Sebastiano Sandri’s important collection of 19th-century painting, the subject in 1941 of a long article in the Milanese magazine L’Esame by its editor Enrico Somaré. This also mentioned the painting and put forward a description of it in intimate terms in line with the reappraisal developed in the meantime of 19th-century Italian art as a whole: “a lane running alongside a grey field, small, bare trees with just a few last leaves clinging to the branches and others fallen on the saddened earth, an absent sky and perhaps, in some remote distance, the faint chimes of a bell”.⁷ 

Alessandro Botta 

¹ Comment in the margin of a three-colour reproduction of the painting dedicated to the playwright Domenico Tumiati. See Rebora 1995, p. 377.

² For the artist’s links with Japan, see Turina 2020.

³ See in particular the articles “Non c’è arte vera senza suggestione” and “La suggestione nelle arti figurative” published in the magazine La Triennale in 1896 (issues 8 and 11). Now in Grubicy de Dragon 2009, pp. 155-167.

⁴ See in this connection A. Botta, “Fontanesi e gli artisti: discussioni e polemiche alle soglie della modernità (1892-1911)”, in Reggio Emilia 2019, pp. 30-45.

⁵ “Quadretto dato a Leonardo / Bistolfi 1896 V. Grubicy”; see Rebora 1995, p. 377, no. 639.

⁶ As is known from the correspondence between the two artists, Bistolfi did not receive the work until March 1913. He wrote as follows to Grubicy on 21 February: “When Walter brings me my precious remembrance of you, I will deliver to him some other pictorial effort of mine less unworthy of you. But how I wish you would come and get it yourself!” (card from L. Bistolfi to V. Grubicy, 21 February 1913; Mart, Archivio del ’900, Fondo Vittore Grubicy, Gru.I.1.1.115). Ten days later, news of the painting’s arrival was immediately sent: “I’ve still to see the picture you’ve returned but when my wife phoned today to say that it had arrived safe and sound, she said, ‘You should see how beautiful it is.’ I’ll go and feast my eyes on it on Monday” (postcard from L. Bistolfi to V. Grubicy, 1 March 1913; Mart, Archivio del ‘900, Fondo Vittore Grubicy, Gru.I.1.1.115).

⁷ Somaré 1941. p. 51.