Q130417253

Dated 1915 and held by the Gallerie d'Italia in Milan, this canvas on the conventional support joins two other Morbelli works from 1915 in the same collection, suggesting that the Gallerie d'Italia acquired a group of works from this wartime year that may share related themes or subjects. Morbelli's 1915 production continued his mature divisionist practice under the shadow of the First World War, in which Italy entered on the Allied side in May of that year. For a painter whose career had been defined by meditation on age, institutional life, and the quiet endurance of the marginalized, the war added a new dimension of collective suffering to these established concerns. The Gallerie d'Italia's holdings of multiple 1915 Morbellis represent one of the most concentrated single-year representations of any Italian divisionist painter in institutional collections, offering a rare opportunity to study the consistency and variation within a single year's output at maximum technical maturity.

Canvas in 1915 for Morbelli means a fully developed divisionist surface — patient, fine strokes in calibrated color relationships producing the luminous optical mixture that defined the movement's technical ambition. Three works from the same year in the same collection invites detailed surface comparison: the consistency of stroke size, the palette decisions, the compositional habits.