Art! Art! Art! › Works

Cloud

Antonio Fontanesi, 1880

Cloud, known in Italian as Le nubi, is an oil on canvas by the Italian landscape painter Antonio Fontanesi, dated 1880. It belongs to the Turin Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art and comes from the last phase of his career, painted in Turin after his return from Japan.

Where to see it

Cloud is in the collection of the Turin Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Turin, Italy. The museum's record identifier for the work is gam3990, which can help when searching the collection or asking staff about the painting. Works in permanent collections are not always on view, so check the museum's official website for current display status before you visit.

What to look for in person

A late work, painted back in Turin

Fontanesi returned from Japan in 1878, and Cloud belongs to the period of work that followed in Turin, the final chapter of his career. When you stand in front of it, consider it less as an isolated picture and more as the statement of a mature painter who had spent years teaching and working abroad. If other Fontanesi landscapes are on view in the gallery, comparing them with this 1880 canvas is a useful way to see how his late work relates to what came before.

Reading the sky and the paint

The title points the viewer toward the sky, so give the upper part of the canvas your attention first. Fontanesi is widely recognised as a landscape painter for whom light, weather and atmosphere mattered as much as topography. Step close to see how the oil paint has been applied, then step back to see how those marks combine into a single effect of air and light. Moving between the two distances is the most rewarding way to look at a landscape of this kind.

A picture that critics rejected

Cloud was received very negatively by critics. That reception is part of the painting's story and a reason to look at it with fresh eyes rather than through its original reviews. Instead of searching for a single correct reading, notice your own first response: what holds your attention, what seems unusual, and what you would expect a landscape of the period to show. Bringing your own observations to a once-criticised work is often more revealing than accepting the verdict of its first audience.

About the painting

Antonio Fontanesi is one of the best-known Italian landscape painters of the nineteenth century, and Turin was central to his working life. He taught landscape painting at the city's Accademia Albertina, and in the 1870s he travelled to Japan, where he was invited to teach Western-style painting in Tokyo. His time there is widely remembered as an early and influential chapter in the introduction of European oil painting techniques to Japanese artists. He returned from Japan in 1878 and resumed work in Turin, entering the final period of his career. Cloud, titled Le nubi in Italian, dates from 1880 and belongs to these late years. It is painted in oil on canvas, the medium Fontanesi favoured for his landscapes and the one he had taught abroad. The painting did not find favour on its first showing: critics responded to it very negatively. For visitors today, that reception adds a layer of interest. A work that was rejected in its own time can tell us something about the expectations of its audience as well as about the artist's own direction. The picture is now part of the collection of the Turin Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, the city's public museum of modern art, where it is catalogued under the identifier gam3990. Seeing it in Turin places the painting in the city where it was made and where Fontanesi spent much of his career as a painter and teacher.

Key facts

More by Antonio Fontanesi

• April
• Plateau in Bugey
• Old Market of Florence

Sources

• Wikipedia (it) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
• Europeana