The painting was bought for the Cariplo Collection on the antique market in 1984. The inscription in ink on the stretcher indicates the title of the work and its original provenance in the Botta Collection. This is the only documentary evidence discovered so far that connects the painting to the collector Gustavo Botta, a poet, literary critic and connoisseur of art. It does not in fact figure among the paintings exhibited at the Galleria Scopinich, Milan, in April 1934 on occasion of the sale by auction of his renowned collection. Gustavo Botta’s interest in the school of Lombard naturalism – and especially Mosè Bianchi, with whom Pompeo Mariani was connected by artistic affinities as well as close family ties – supports the hypothesis that the painting may have belonged to his collection and been sold on some undocumented occasion other than the auction of 1934.

It has recently been suggested that the painting can be identified as the Olive Harvest dated 1917 and presented in the artist’s solo show at the Galleria Pesaro, Milan, in 1923 (no. 96 in the catalogue). This significant overview of the painter’s entire repertoire included a large group of works on this theme painted from life in the olive groves around the seaside resort of Bordighera, where he lived on a permanent basis as from 1907.

The sketchbooks bear witness to this interest as early as 1898, when Mariani visited Bordighera for the first time with his mother, in the shape of drawings from life, such as Nocturne in the Olive Grove and Evening in the Wood. Some oil paintings, already distinguished by the close-up view from below that was to become a recurrent characteristic of the subsequent compositions, were produced shortly afterwards. The studies of the artist’s maturity focused on the work of woodcutters and the olive harvest, as attested by a corpus of sketches dated 1913 and the drawings for the years 1917 and 1918.

In this work, the artist drew upon his large corpus of sketches and drawings in pencil or charcoal, some of which produced many years before. At the same time, he developed his studies from life so as ultimately to attain unprecedented expressive freedom, not least because of a strongly evocative technique, as in Olive Grove (1912, Milan, Palazzo Isimbardi [1]). The brushwork became less and less descriptive. Quick, jagged strokes alternated with thick highlights. A focus on the gnarled trunks and interwoven branches led to increasingly blurred outlines and finally to great formal synthesis.