Konrad Mägi Saaremaa Landscape

This is rare example from Mägi’s oeuvre in which he has painted the forest. Mägi normally placed forest motifs in the background, his compositions were defined by other natural objects or sometimes single trees, but there were only a few other occasions when he rendered such an entire forest mass. His main goal throughout his oeuvre was to depict different fields of colour and to create small units of rhythm in those fields by using dense brushwork. Vertical short brushstrokes may refer to his Saaremaa period, but the dating cannot be trusted without reservations. It is, however, highly probable that the painting was made before the mid-1910s, i.e. before Mägi stopped using the above-described brushwork technique.

The way the cloud landscape has been rendered is closely reminiscent of works created in Saaremaa, several of which feature similar elongated strips of clouds.