Women in a Landscape

Women in a Landscape, now in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, is typical of the compositional type Monticelli returned to throughout his career: female figures situated in open parkland or garden settings, their forms used as colour events within a broader chromatic orchestration. Brighton's collection, assembled partly from private donations in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, acquired Monticelli's work when British enthusiasm for his painting was at its height — a period when critics associated his colour and handling with the emerging Post-Impressionist tradition that Fry and others were championing. On panel, the work represents Monticelli's preferred support for the most intensely worked of his outdoor figure subjects, where the rigid backing allowed him to build up paint layers without the flexibility problems of canvas.

Panel support is used here to sustain Monticelli's heaviest impasto passages. The figures are distinguished from the landscape ground through concentrated, unmixed colour application — a woman's dress might be a single stroke of pure crimson or cobalt set against the more modulated landscape tones.