The backdrop to life

France, 1883. Claude Monet, aged 43 at the time, had just returned from a long trip to Normandy. One morning, after breakfast, he announced to his partner Alice that he wanted to move, with their children – she had six, he had three – to the area of Giverny, a Norman village with a population of 300 that sits at the confluence between the Seine and the Epte rivers. He adored the landscape there, which he felt was ideal for his passions of painting and botany. Alice Hoschedé listened, and then smiled. They set off. Monet bought a large residence with a barn and spacious vegetable plot that would become his studio and garden while he refurbished the house, studying the relationship between indoors and outdoors. The facade was bright pink, with the interiors leaning towards dark, cool shades, with blue tiles in the kitchen, yellow walls in the dining room and blue for the lounge, home to his adored Japanese prints by Hiroshige and Utamaro; their expression of nature a significant infwluence on the artist.

While the interiors of the home in Giverny embraced the cliché of late-century bourgeois French architecture, the outdoors reflected Monet’s true brilliance. The large vegetable plot was transformed into a garden that, rejecting the traditional Parisian orthogonal style, was free, irrational, and full of flowers that bloomed throughout the year. This was Clos Normand, the true source of inspiration for Monet, who expanded the garden a decade later, acquiring a plot on the other side of the railway line. He had another plan for this area; a basin where he wanted to grow a new species of flower, a cross between a white lily and a tropical variety. Monet had discovered the flower by chance at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and realised that what he needed was a large expanse of water and a bridge. The first was provided by the Ru, a tributary of the Epte, while the second came from Japan, drawing inspiration from the beloved prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai that adorned his lounge.

Italy, 1861. Silvestro Lega was 35, a painter who had already gained fame but who no longer felt inspired by Florence, where he had moved – little more than a boy – from Modigliana to follow his dream of art and to escape a stifling life. At the same time, he was reluctant to stray too far from the stone, the cafés and the lifestyle of Florence, at the time a European capital. He thus chose to move to the country residence of the Batelli family in Piagentina, Oltrarno. Now a busy district bordering Porta alla Croce, it was considered open countryside at the time, sitting at the foot of the Fiesole hill, where the Africo torrent flowed into the river Arno. The Batelli home was one of just a few farmhouses in the vicinity of the Trattoria del Gobbo in Bellariva, an extremely popular venue among artists and the middle class. Lega was enchanted by the place, to which he dedicated one of his masterpieces, After Lunch, (The Trellis), painted in 1868 and now at home in the Brera Gallery. It depicts an open-air family scene, with an atmosphere typical of late summer. In the foreground, a maid carries a tray. In the background, a family group of women with a child. A birthday, perhaps, or just an ordinary day. The outdoor space here is a courtyard, and it is clearly extremely hot. Dressed in traditional clothes for the time, the women seek shade under a pergola of vines. The landscape in the distance features a building, maybe a farmhouse, although it is unclear. There is a lawn, and a line of trees in the background.

Influenced by Lega, other artists moved to Piagentina, forming a group that would bear his name. These included Giuseppe Abbati, Odoardo Borrani, Raffaello Sernesi and lastly Telemaco Signorini, the most refined of all. They represented the early nucleus of the Macchiaioli, who fought to counter the inertia of the Academies, drawing on the energy of the Unification. The “patch theory” was more than speculation; it was a vision of forms created by light though patches of colour, a characteristic of the Tuscan countryside. Clear, bordering and overlapping patches. The Macchiaioli saw the artist as unbound by academic formality, free to depict the actual scenes they perceived with realism, devoid of mannerism or interpretation. It is the artistic expression of the Italian outdoors, a setting subdued by light, where emotions provide a backdrop for that informal, paced, familiar and indistinct thing called life.