Two Little Italian Girls by a Village 1889

Curator: Look at the sun-drenched stones! Waterhouse painted "Two Little Italian Girls by a Village" back in 1889, seemingly *en plein air*, wouldn't you agree? Editor: Yes, you can almost feel the heat radiating off it. It has this slightly unsettling innocence about it...the girls seem quite separate in their worlds, despite their proximity. It feels...incomplete. Curator: Ah, an incomplete narrative, a snapshot! It seems less about telling a specific story, and more about evoking a fleeting sense of place, a feeling of light and texture. Perhaps that wall acts as both divider and viewing point? It speaks of boundaries... Editor: It absolutely does. Walls as social, psychological...spatial divides are rife across cultures, and they often act as barriers but also points of potential interaction, a shared vista if you like. Those cool tones of their dresses... against the ochre landscape; that tells a certain tale of perhaps rural labour versus childish curiosity. Are those oranges she's carrying? Curator: Perhaps she's running errands for family; it hints at the realities beyond the picture frame. You know, he was quite influenced by Italian Renaissance painting – it peeks through the romantic surface! Do you catch the little hints of geometric shapes adding visual stability? Editor: Good point. It isn’t all hazy impressionism. Speaking of hazy, for me the use of olive trees framing them introduces ideas of Mediterranean cultural memory; in classical times they often stood as metaphors of peace and fertility but later with Christianity came to mean penance. It really throws a new complexity on what feels, at first glance, quite 'simple.' Curator: Absolutely, those loaded visual cues Waterhouse expertly employs add those nuances. To bring it full circle though, even knowing that subtext, it all falls away. And what you are left with, what truly captures you I think, is this feeling – this sense of captured light. I could step right in there. Editor: Absolutely, it has that deceptive layering that all great painting masters do; so it's a simple thing. Two children, a sun-drenched Italian vista… yet we go down, into those layers. And never quite come out.