Landscape.

Oil on canvas, signed in the lower right corner. Measurements: 29.2 x 44 cm / 11.5 x 17.32 in. Framed work. 

As Paola Malgarejo writes in her exhaustive analysis of the oil painting The Iguazú Waterfall kept in the National Museum of Fine Arts (1): “The Argentine painter Augusto Ballerini combined a vocation, that of the artist who paints outdoors, with a personal interest linked to the pleasure of traveling. The oldest drawings that are preserved are the views of ports, bays and lighthouses that he made in the Maldonado area, Uruguay, between 1873 and 1874, when he was barely sixteen years old. His last works, painted at the age of forty-four, a few days before his death, retain some of this early interest in the exploration of territories, since they were made during one of his many excursions to the Cordoba mountains. They are the extremes of a life, in the center of which a solid plastic formation unfolds, in Buenos Aires first and in the Reale Istituto di Belle Arti in Rome later. In 1892, shortly after returning from his academic trip to Europe, Ballerini was part of the Scientific-Collecting Commission designated by the government and the Argentine Geographical Institute for a trip to northern Argentina, led by the scientist Gustavo Niederlein, on a journey through the provinces of Chaco, Formosa, Entre Ríos, Corrientes and Misiones and in the neighboring countries of Paraguay and Brazil. (...) The journey was for Ballerini the possibility of approaching nature again and painting it in quick sketches”. We can see here one of those landscapes painted in his tours of the country, made with the ease of an artist in the full use of the technique, as well as required by the conditions of "plein air" painting. The shore of a lake or the meanders of a calm river, in whose water mirror the cloudy sky of that day is reflected. Behind some mountains, a group of trees, and in the center, on a small islet near the shore, two thin and solitary trees, protagonists of the landscape.

Augusto Ballerini (1857-1902), was an Argentine painter of portraits, historical scenes and landscapes. He began his artistic studies with Francesco Romero, a teacher of important Argentine painters, and continued his training in Italy, entering the Royal Institute of Fine Arts, and later, with César Maccari. With the artists Ángel della Valle and Ernesto de la Cárcova, he created "La colmena", an institution dedicated to the promotion and exhibition of works of art. He was a member of the Stimulus Society for Fine Arts. In 1895, the government bought his work "A Moonlit Night in Venice", the first painting by a national painter destined for the National Museum of Fine Arts.

Notes:

1. https://www.bellasartes.gob.ar/coleccion/obra/1846/