The view of Bogliasco, a town on the Riviera di Levante in Liguria, employs a deft compositional structure that arranges the landscape into a carefully balanced juxtaposition of masses and a precise succession of perspective planes, from the bridge in the foreground to the brightly coloured houses and the profile of the hills against the deep blue of the night sky. This calibrated composition is developed in a range of colours hinging on the contrast between various shades of pink and intense greens and blues, and quick brushstrokes that allow the panel, which has no preparatory layer of plaster, to show through.

Together with Lake Iseo and the valleys of Bergamo (e.g. The Upper Valley of the Serio, Cariplo Collection), the Gulf of Tigullio was one of the artist’s favourite subjects as from halfway through the 1910s, when he produced a series of watercolour views of Portofino, Paraggi, Santa Margherita and Rapallo. Tosi’s relationship with the place became more intense after he bought a house in the town of Zoagli, where he spent long periods in the spring until 1950. The early paintings, still closely connected with the models of Lombard naturalism, gave way to a form of landscape painting whose structural use of colour and accentuation of compositional architecture reflects the influence of Cézanne, celebrated with a major retrospective at the 1920 Venice Biennial (Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della città di Venezia). Tosi’s works took on a broader, geometric handling of spatiality and greater balance and severity of composition during the 1920s in line with the approach of the Novecento Italiano movement, whose governing committee he served on as from 1925. This phase saw an interest in the riviera landscape as developed through human effort in the construction of houses, roads and bridges. Examples include The Ligurian Riviera (Venice, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro [1]), presented at the Venice Biennial (Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia) in 1926.

The work examined here belongs to the period of Tosi’s full maturity. The same view appears in another painting of 1933 entitled Bogliasco (private collection), which was shown in the major retrospective of the artist’s work in the 1956 Biennial (XXVIII Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della città di Venezia). In this second version, the painter presents the same view in broad daylight on canvas and in a slightly smaller format. The execution of replicas and variations of the same subject in different seasons of the year and conditions of light is characteristic of the working method developed by Tosi to translate his rigorous analysis of reality into a unifying vision of the landscape rich in emotive overtones.

The painting in the Cariplo Collection is an excellent example of the artist’s mastery of colour and composition at the time of his greatest international renown, which began in 1931 with the prize of 100,000 lire at the first Rome Quadrennial, where an entire room was devoted to his work, and the Grand Prix for painting in Paris. It was also in 1933 that Waldemar George, the authoritative French critic of Polish origin and champion of Italian primacy in the return to the great classical tradition, wrote a study of Tosi’s artistic career, distinguished by participation in the major exhibitions of the period and the presence of works in the leading museums of Europe and the most important Italian private collections.