PLEIN AIR HERITAGE
This portrait of an Italian plein air painter, perhaps Giovanni Carnovali, look suspiciously like a studio painting, since the landscape is little more than a misty backdrop to a static pose. It may very well be that the painter, Giuseppe Mazza, lacked experience in painting figures outdoors, but his subject, Carnovali, needed to be shown in the landscape since he was an adventurous, experimental plein air painter. Carnovali made his first painting trips on foot while he was still a teenager, and he undertook a major painting trip to Rome, Naples, and Milan while in his late 20s. Along the way, he absorbed the influences of Italian and French painters, influences that may have cost him a major commission in 1863, when an ecclesiastical commission rejected his experimental handling of light.…