The Last Journey (Return to Native Soil)

This scene typifies an elegiac, melancholic aspect of European art of the fin-de-si�cle. Here the Tyrolian painter shows a farm labourer’s journey to burial, returned to the earth he had long worked, the cart bearing his coffin and a mourner now drawn by the same horse that had pulled his plow. Immutable mountains rising in the background, in what becomes akin to a frieze, contrast with the pathetic mortality of the foreground cort�ge.

This canvas was completed in 1895 and won the First International Prize given by the Italian government in the Venetian Biennale of that year.