HIGH solitudes and bitter cold, glittering pinnacles and blue glaciers, bleak ravines and frigid pine forests, wide snowfields glistening in the sunlight, gnarled trees with curiously writhen branches and shattered rocks through the clefts of which trickle silver threads of icecold water. Green pastures surrounding white villages, calm-eyed oxen ploughing the rugged soil or browsing in meadows of radiant Alpine flowers, and toil-weary peasants performing their endless tasks with utter stolidity and resignation. The whole seen through a limpid atmosphere and seemingly enveloped in a great silence.

These are the impressions which the eye receives from the pictures of Giovanni Segantini, the strange peasant painter and mystic, the symbolist who worshipped mountains and who spent his life in their service.

Segantini was born of Italian parents in 1858, at Arco, in the Austrian Tyrol, where he lived until five years of

age.

From the very first his surroundings were calculated to leave an abiding impress on his mind and character. His parents lived in a dilapidated cottage in a tiny village sheltering under an assemblage of mighty peaks. The river Sarco foamed noisily past the house and into the distance where the valley opened out towards the blue waters of Lake Garda-a wild and fascinating country.

It is noticeable that light and colour impressed Segantini as a child and, having a vivid memory, he was

able to recall in after life things which happened in the first few years of his existence. He relates, for instance, with innumerable details how, at the age of five, his father took him to Milan to the house of a half-sister with whom he was left to lead a lonely existence in a miserable house in the Via San Simone.

Here he became strangely affected by the mystery of things and haunted by the indefinable presence of the unknown. Left by himself the lad would stand at the window for hours thinking of he knew not what. "When the church bells rang out festive peals," he says, "my breathing came quicker and my soul was tortured. What was I thinking of? I do not know; but I felt deeply. I suffered, but I did not know sorrow." This solitude which in his early years was a nameless terror to him, became afterwards part of his very existence and a condition of life which he ardently desired.

The dusty clamour of cities never attracted him, and in his later life he lived where his soul had always been calling him, where his imagination opened like a flower to the sun, high up among the lonely ranges of the Alps.

Unlettered and untaught he had the precious gift of being able to describe in picturesque language anything which intimately affected him. In his letters he relates how, when he was six years old, he made his first acquaintance with the implements which were eventually to spread his fame over Europe. On going to the landing of the tenement where he and his half-sister lodged he saw one day a collection of pails, brushes and colours.

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The sight of these unexpected and unusual objects aroused in me a lively excitement. It was a feeling of joy mixed with uneasiness at their unknown nature."

The next morning he watched a tall man with a large brush painting the wall over and over again with white paint. Upon this surface the man began to draw lines up and down and then to decorate the wall with various tints.

"After gazing at these splashes of colour some time I

began to see something in them; there was an Austrian soldier, his body bending forward with long arms beating a big drum; this was on a cart drawn by a large dog; but no, it was a bridge, and a man was leaning over the parapet. Then I returned to the soldier and the dog; they were no longer there, and, to my great surprise I saw nothing more than shapeless dabs."

"I remained for a long time absorbed in thought. In those dabs I saw a varied life, full of strange beasts and deformed creatures that appeared and disappeared at every glance. On those walls I saw a whole world of weird dreams, but the dream I was seeking, my constant longing, was green fields, clear brooks flowing over beds of fine sand, my little garden at Arco, those cool and shady nooks which I loved."

Lonely as at first his life was, it became worse and worse and finally unbearable. Hearing a neighbour speak of someone who had left the city to walk to France, young Giovanni, though very thin and delicate, was immediately on fire to do likewise. He started off secretly one morning and, after walking all day, fell in with some kindly peasants who, seeing his exhausted condition, took him to their farm where for two or three years he served them as swineherd.

Eventually he returned to Milan and began to study ornamental drawing at an evening school. He visited exhibitions of modern art, but the paintings had nothing to tell him. They had no power to hold my thoughts. They were the work of men who had looked at things and copied them on canvas."

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While at the school he entered an elementary figuredrawing class and remained there long enough to convince himself of "the uselessness of Academic instruction for those born with a true feeling for art, and of the damage the Academies do to real art in turning out painters who are not artists."

He realised the futility of trying to teach Art, and

while at the Academy his contempt of conventional rules caused him to be regarded with disfavour.

Mr. Villari, in his memoir of the painter, relates that at this time Segantini worked in the studio of a designer of church banners and that the latter, a vainglorious personage, once asked Giovanni what he would do if he were as great an artist as his master, to which the lad replied: "Hang myself.”

Perhaps the most characteristic thing about Segantini's youth is his courage and individuality. His first oil painting was an innovation, for with it he inaugurated a new method of reproducing on canvas the effect of light. This first picture was the "Choir of the Church of Saint Antonio." Being too poor to buy a canvas he soaked a coarse sugar-sack in oil, stretched it on a frame and used it for the painting.

It represents the interior of a choir. A boy in a white surplice stands before a lectern, and on the left is a large window whence a torrent of sunlight pours in on the carved stalls.

Segantini, in producing this picture, discovered that the secret of obtaining the effect of light lay in using atoms of colour in juxtaposition, in dividing the colours and instead of mixing them on the palette, laying them side by side on the canvas so as to make them blend in the eye of the observer. Some years after, one of the artist's fellowstudents wrote concerning this picture: "It was at once noticed that from the painted window the light really poured in. At that time Segantini certainly did not know that there was a scientific theory of divisionism, and, in fact, no one had as yet attempted that method of painting." In the numerous pictures that followed he tried various styles, seeking to find the golden outlet from whence his genius could take wing. His paintings had no sale, and he supported himself by giving lessons and designing advertisements.

Compatriots, brimful of Academic traditions, scoffed at

his pictures, and exhibitions paid him the compliment of closing their doors to his work; but, encouraged by a small circle of interested men who lacked unfortunately the wherewithal to relieve his monetary difficulty, he persevered and in a few years his pertinacity was rewarded. With the proceeds of the sale of several pictures he was enabled to satisfy his irresistible longing to escape the bondage of town life and to substitute for the din of streets the peace that dwells in the mountains. "Here," he said, "the tumult of the world below does not reach and I can continue my dreams uninterruptedly." For some few years he stayed at Brianza wandering about among the hills and trying to reproduce the feelings which he felt especially at twilight when, as he tells us, his soul was "filled with sweet melancholy."

The sadness of the toiling lives of the peasants aroused his sympathy, and in his paintings he makes it his great theme.

Segantini's mind, though delighting in joyous colour, was of the sombre order. He had peasant blood in his veins, and it was to this, perhaps, that he owed his deep sympathy with the poor country people amongst whom he spent his days. It has often been pointed out that in nearly all his paintings of this period the heads of the figures are bent forward as if in great weariness. Yet it is true that this feeling of sadness in his paintings seldom sounds too deep a note of melancholy. The poverty which afflicts his peasants does not degrade them; it is the feeling of peace and resignation which Segantini makes evident in all his pictures. His most beautiful work in this vein is the "Ave Maria a Trasbordo," a luminous painting similar in spirit to Millet's Angelus. The scene is a placid mountain lake at sunset. On it a boat containing sheep and three human beings. The man is resting on his oars with head bent forward, the woman holding a little child has her head bowed also as the bell rings in the tiny church at the edge of the lake. A wonderful serenity is