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Lot Essay
Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
After 1938 de Chirico began to shift the style of his work and to look to Romantic and Baroque painting for inspiration. This stylistic change in his work coincided with his return to Italy following a two-year stay in the United States, and it marked a return to some of the imagery in his paintings of the 1920s. After a piece entitled "Le nature-morte" appeared in Illustrazione italiana in 1942, de Chirico undertook a series of still-lifes, using game and fowl as subjects. He referred to his still-lifes as vita silente to underscore that their subject was the silent life of the objects. The still-life gave de Chirico a vehicle to concentrate on experimenting with the inter-relationships of volumes, forms and plasticity. Over the course of the next decade he undertook a cycle of studies in which the still life represented either an allegory of a season, an illusion to something elemental in nature, or a signal of the temporality of time. Vita silente con lepre e pernici in un paesaggio is executed in rich tones that are suggestive of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and its realistic aspect is reminscent of the still-lifes of Gustave Courbet whom de Chirico greatly admired. During this period de Chirico experimented with different techniques and the thick brushwork of the present painting shows him working wet on wet in order to achieve a sense of immediacy in the painting.
After 1938 de Chirico began to shift the style of his work and to look to Romantic and Baroque painting for inspiration. This stylistic change in his work coincided with his return to Italy following a two-year stay in the United States, and it marked a return to some of the imagery in his paintings of the 1920s. After a piece entitled "Le nature-morte" appeared in Illustrazione italiana in 1942, de Chirico undertook a series of still-lifes, using game and fowl as subjects. He referred to his still-lifes as vita silente to underscore that their subject was the silent life of the objects. The still-life gave de Chirico a vehicle to concentrate on experimenting with the inter-relationships of volumes, forms and plasticity. Over the course of the next decade he undertook a cycle of studies in which the still life represented either an allegory of a season, an illusion to something elemental in nature, or a signal of the temporality of time. Vita silente con lepre e pernici in un paesaggio is executed in rich tones that are suggestive of the Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix and its realistic aspect is reminscent of the still-lifes of Gustave Courbet whom de Chirico greatly admired. During this period de Chirico experimented with different techniques and the thick brushwork of the present painting shows him working wet on wet in order to achieve a sense of immediacy in the painting.