Whilst this was many years before the artist started to perfect his surrealist approach, there is still much to see and understand in this piece. Firstly, it displays his world at that time, which was the town in which he spent his childhood, Figueras. This region is a part of Catalonia and sits in the North East of Spain, relatively close to the French border. It is now home to Dali himself who is buried underneath a building that serves as both a theatre and museum. It feels incredible that even at this young age, Salvador was already using oil paints.
This child genius boasted confidence that allowed him to take on new challenges without any anxiety at all. It would not be long after this that he decided to become an artist as his profession, having considered a number of directions in his early years. We are all, of course, grateful now that he made this decision. During the period of Landscape near Figueras he was amidst his impressionist era, which lasted for at least a decade. Perhaps one can argue that he had not yet developed his own signature style yet, and was simply enjoying art for its aesthetic value at that point.
The artwork was completed over an existing postcard that the young man had at the time and is now a part of the collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. The colour scheme is dominated with tones of green, with the artist then adding tones of white for the clouds and reddish tints for the roofs of two houses. There is plenty of foliage in both the foreground and background which he uses a darker green for. Whilst being fairly primitive, it is exciting to see the young artist moving through a stylistic period which lasted until around the late 1920s before he moved on to the surrealist and cubist periods.
