Giovanni Segantini

Giovanni Segantini had a hard childhood in Milan, including time in a reformatory, before studying at the Brera Academy. He became known for paintings of Alpine life, shepherds and pastures painted in a divisionist technique of separate strokes of colour that catch the clear mountain light. His later works became increasingly Symbolist, and his great Alpine Triptych of life, nature and death is in the Segantini Museum at St Moritz. He died of peritonitis while painting high on the Schafberg above Pontresina in the Engadine.