A mountain road

A mountain road (1872) by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, now in the collection of The Mesdag Collection, represents the artist's engagement with landscape as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between direct observation and pictorial structure, light, and atmosphere. Adolphe Monticelli was a Marseille-born painter whose wildly impastoed late Romantic figure scenes exercised a powerful influence on Van Gogh, who collected his work and explicitly modeled certain paintings on Monticelli's technique.

Monticelli applied paint with extraordinary impasto thickness — sometimes inches deep — building richly encrusted surfaces that transform his romantic fête galante subjects into glittering tapestries of color.