“Having successfully arrived at Capri, ” writes Konrad Mägi on March 2 in the year 1922 to his friends. “The island is divine.” A grand figure in the Estonian art history, the most significant artist of the first half of the century, whose colour magic shatters everyone, had arrived at Capri, where started a new stage of his creation. Even though Mägi spent on the island only one short month and by today are known only around a dozen painting of Capri, this has been sufficient to create a legend. “After a long interval Mägi was again in the condition, when what he saw allured him to paint with an irresistible power, where his mind was alert and accepting,” writes Evi Pihlak, the best expert of the creation of Mägi. These were the Capri works, where were preserved the most important traits, which also could have been detected in the previous works by Mägi, but the additions were more than remarkable: colour handling is now “much more harmonious and happier”, the artist has given up the disruption of colour unity, preferring to that “the abundance of hues and a delicate contract”, the upbuilding of the paintings is “much more spacious, absolutely new rhythmical correlations have been found and single elements have become more plastic”. Furthermore. The new vison manner of Mägi is “more free and natural”, the chosen motif “more curvy and possessing a greater internal dismembering ability”, but the form and colour remain “extremely tightly connected” with each other. Mägi is certainly inspired with enthusiasm, the preceding trip through Germany had interested him to a certain extent, but Capri was for him “the source of new picturesque impressions”, extraordinary, grand, unprecedented. After a long time Mägi paints from his heart, his soul, the long-planned foreign trip has finally paid off, and has done it with flying colours. During his stay on the island he mainly concentrates on the nocturnal or evening motives, where colours become juicier and deeper, where the light resembles wine and the whole milieu is stunningly romantic. A bigger emphasis on architectural objects can be explained by white walls, which started to glow mysteriously in the evenings. A building, having been placed on the top of a mountain is preceded by a bumpy landscape, the vigour of the colour mosaic and freedom of the brush strike of which are unique. Through dark and light green hills, through red glowing trees and bushes, incited by yellow and purple dots, the glance captures a joint wall, strange trees growing behind that and finally the bottomless blue of the night sky. “He also started painting in such mood. In this manner in the whole series of paintings will be heard the leitmotif of “the divine island”,” writes Pihlak. But this seems to be present there anyhow.
The work was exposed at the exhibition, which was held in 1978 in the Estonian Museum of Arts.