File:Artgate Fondazione Cariplo - De Grada Raffaele, Stagno o Paesaggio.jpg

The painting was purchased for the Cariplo Collection in 1949 from the Associazione Artisti d’Italia, which Raffaele De Grada served as a director from 1945 on.

While a date around 1949 has recently been suggested, the close stylistic similarities with the views of Versilia produced in the second half of the 1930s make it possible to establish that the canvas may have been painted in the period between 1936, when the painter started to spend his summers at Forte dei Marmi (like other artists from Lombardy, including Carlo Carrà, Arturo Tosi and Achille Funi), and 1941. It presents the same compositional structure of parallel planes, the sober range of greens, browns and blues, and above all the juxtaposition of short, thick brushstrokes as a group of Tuscan landscapes from the period 1940–41, including Stream (Milan, Renato Montagna Collection, 1942) and Cottages at Dawn (Venice, Volpi Misurata Collection, 1942). The concise, orderly rendering of volumes and the constructive use of brushwork are influenced by the study of Cézanne’s work that the artist began in the 1920s and continued throughout his career, to the point of becoming a stylistic hallmark.

De Grada interprets the specific character of the Tuscan landscape and above all its emotional implications, translating the views of San Gimignano painted repeatedly until his maturity (see Landscape, in the Cariplo Collection) into square and solid forms. At the same time, the calm and silent atmosphere of Versilia is captured with in increasingly delicate and ethereal brushstrokes.