About the Work
Native painting or avant-garde? Or perhaps even both? Alongside Hodler and Kirchner, Segantini is considered to be the most important chronicler of life in the High Alps. He was raised in poverty and later celebrated for his sentimental depictions of farm life, in which he combined aspects of Realism and Symbolism. This painting is a smaller version of his unfinished chef d’oeuvre ‘Life, Nature and Death’. Depicting a herd of sheep in the Engadine Mountains being driven home in the evening, Segantini is addressing the harmony of man and nature.
About the Acquisition
Family Löwenstein left for America, to then return to Frankfurt in 1870 as the millionaires Livingstone. Their daughter Rose Livingston (1860–1914), who remained unmarried throughout her life, established the Rose Livingston Foundation in 1913 with a donation of several million, for an old people’s home for educated ladies of different classes. Like her sister Fanny, she bequeathed parts of her art collection to the Städel. Among them were several landscape paintings by one of her friends: the Frankfurt painter Wilhelm Steinhausen.
