Il melo bianco

Samuolis painted the White Apple Tree in 1932, in a Lithuania that had been an independent country for only about 14 years after long rule from the Russian empire. That same year he and a group of young Lithuanian painters formed a modernist circle called ARS, set on bringing bolder European styles home against the taste of their academic teachers. You can see it in the tree, its trunk bent and pale, almost ghostly, and in the small hunched figure of a woman working the uneven field behind it. The mood is lonely and a little melancholy rather than pretty. It became one of the best loved of all Lithuanian landscapes. Samuolis had little time to build on it, dying of tuberculosis in 1942 in his early forties.