Artist-craftsman, draftsman, decorator, set designer and ceramist, Aleardo Terzi trained on the example of his father Andrea - an engraver and watercolorist engaged in the publishing field - and then briefly attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, hometown and, finally, independently undertake a career as an illustrator. Meriggio d'autunno is one of the greatest achievements of Terzi's divisionism, which evolved for about a decade starting from the 1910s through a bold palette and a discontinuous and dynamic brushstroke. The female figure is the absolute protagonist of the entire work of the Palermitan who favors the taste of the secessionists Enrico Lionne, Arturo Noci and Camillo Innocenti, in turn conditioned in the choice of subjects and settings by post-impressionist and Nabis models. Removed from the social themes of their northern colleagues, the Roman "intimist divisionists", poised between decadence and avant-garde, are configured in the Italian artistic panorama of the early twentieth century as the link between the late nineteenth-century tradition and the nascent Futurism, which sees in Giacomo Balla is a key figure. Terzi, in Autumn afternoon, uses pieces of color with Fauvian accents and tries his hand at the rendering of artificial light already experimented by the “Piedmontese” master in the paradigmatic Arc Lamp (1909-1911).