Park Scene

Painted in 1877, Park Scene is a work by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, now in the collection of Santa Barbara Museum of Art, that reflects the artistic concerns of the late 19th century — an era of fundamental transformation in both the methods and purposes of European and American painting. 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.