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
The family was known as the Löwensteins when they emigrated to America, and as the Livingstons when they returned to Frankfurt as millionaires in 1870. Daughter Fanny was born in 1853 in Louisville, Kentucky, in the United States. After her return to Germany she married medical consultant Dr Salomon Herxheimer. When this specialist for skin and venereal diseases died in 1899, she founded the Sanitätsrat Dr. Salomon Herxheimersche Stiftung, which treated impoverished patients suffering from skin diseases free of charge. Fanny died in Frankfurt in 1922 and, like her sister, Rose Livingston, left part of her art collection to the Städel.
