The Last Effort of the Day Giovanni Segantini

Segantini’s themes deal essentially with peasant scenes and mountain landscapes. His early work shows the influence of Jean-François Millet, whose realist and poetic paintings had a profound impact on his art. The significance of Millet’s images of peasant life appears in The Last Effort of the Day, which depicts an old man at dusk followed by two sheep on his way home. Carrying an awkward bundle on his back, he descends the steep grooves cut into mountainside. The man and the sheep stand out above the diagonal line of the horizon in dark silhouette, sharply backlit against the yellow pallor of the sky that fades into gradations of blue-green and dull, grey-blue colors. Enveloped in a sallow light, the pastoral landscape of man and beast forms a single unity, the color scheme heavy and earthbound in yellow, ochre, brown, and grey tones.