Anita Malfatti, was a contemporary of Tarsila do Amaral but is considerably less known outside of Brazil. In A Ventania (Gale), Malfatti wittily reverses the traditional journey made by traveler-artists such as Frederic Edwin Church in the nineteenth century, by traveling from her home in South America to paint the “exotic” wilderness of North America. Inspired by Malfatti’s stay on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine in the United States, A Ventania is a modernist rendition of the classic field-to-studio painting. Experiential rather than pictorial, Malfatti eschewed mimetic reproduction of the storm. Instead, her painting conveys the sensation of being caught in a gale, the buffeting winds and the swiftly darkening sky captured through swirling brush strokes and smudges of color.