Description
A pale mountain, streaked with lavender shadow and gold light, fills the upper half of the canvas beneath a sky painted in insistent diagonal strokes of blue that leave the weave of the canvas visible underneath, almost like hatching in a drawing rather than a smoothly brushed sky.
Below the peak, a small tan-and-white farmhouse sits tucked into a fold of the land among a cluster of darker trees, barely more than a few flat strokes of color. Closer to the viewer, a grove of olive trees spreads across the middle ground, their foliage a soft blue-green built from small, repeated dabs.
The foreground is open grass in warm gold and ochre, streaked with violet shadow under the trees, while a mass of red-orange autumn foliage crowds the left edge for a warm counterpoint to the cooler mountain and sky. No figures appear anywhere in the scene; the whole picture is given over to land, trees and weather.
What stands out here is the sky’s unusually graphic, striped handling, a rougher, more linear touch than the softly blended clouds seen in some of his other landscapes.
Seen from across a room the picture settles into calm horizontal bands of gold, green and violet that read easily at a distance, while the hatched sky and dabbed olive leaves give the surface a textured energy that holds attention up close, a landscape that works at both scales.
