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Lot Essay
After he had been travelling to Provence for several years, La Thangue, in 1904, ventured into Italy. A letter to George Clausen the following year indicates that he and his wife had spent the winter months at Genoa and in the following years he explored the coastline of the Golfo di Genova, settling at the picturesque fishing commune of Pietra Ligure, some forty-five miles to the west of the city. From here he could take one of the bridlepaths into the hills and look along the coast towards Albenga and the Capo di Noli, taking in the tiny island of Gallinaria – a view that Baedeker describes as ‘beautiful’ (Northern Italy, 1913, p. 120).
We may assume that this hillside haunt provided a number of La Thangue’s most celebrated Ligurian landscapes – such as A Ligurian Bay (Dunfermline City Chambers), A Ligurian Bridlepath (Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool) and A Ligurian Gulf (Aberdeen Art Gallery), painted just before the outbreak of the Great War. However none of these canvases is so clearly identifiable from topographic features as the present majestic sweep of hills and headlands. La Thangue had recently told Alfred Munnings that he was looking for a ‘quiet old world’ place to live (Munnings, An Artist’s Life, 1950, pp. 97-8) and here he found a seclusion disrupted only by the sound of foraging sheep. He may even have realized that Isola di Gallinaria, the focal point of the present landscape, was the ancient hermitage of St Martin, the Roman tribune who, after his conversion to Christianity, refused to take up arms on behalf of the Emperor Julian. By an odd coincidence, it was to be on Martinmass, the saint’s day, in 1918 that Armistice was declared.
KMc.
We may assume that this hillside haunt provided a number of La Thangue’s most celebrated Ligurian landscapes – such as A Ligurian Bay (Dunfermline City Chambers), A Ligurian Bridlepath (Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool) and A Ligurian Gulf (Aberdeen Art Gallery), painted just before the outbreak of the Great War. However none of these canvases is so clearly identifiable from topographic features as the present majestic sweep of hills and headlands. La Thangue had recently told Alfred Munnings that he was looking for a ‘quiet old world’ place to live (Munnings, An Artist’s Life, 1950, pp. 97-8) and here he found a seclusion disrupted only by the sound of foraging sheep. He may even have realized that Isola di Gallinaria, the focal point of the present landscape, was the ancient hermitage of St Martin, the Roman tribune who, after his conversion to Christianity, refused to take up arms on behalf of the Emperor Julian. By an odd coincidence, it was to be on Martinmass, the saint’s day, in 1918 that Armistice was declared.
KMc.