A Young Girl with a Flock of Turkeys

Due to political uprisings in his native town of Aosta, Italy, Luigi Chialiva fled to Switzerland around 1821. Before training to be a painter, he graduated with a degree in architecture from the University of Zurich. Foremost a landscape painter, Chialiva's work celebrates the simplicity and beauty of country life and often features young shepherdesses tending to their flocks in the countryside. Having been raised in the countryside, his sensitivity for rendering this genre is expressed particularly well through his strong colorism, expressive brushwork and use of light that can be likened to those of the Impressionists.