Description / Expertise
This magnificent view of the Bay of Naples by the Düsseldorf master Oswald Achenbach can be dated between 1875 and 1885. The sketchy technique, the use of heavy impasto to add liveliness to the canvas, which is particularly evident in the dabs of yellow paint which are used to convey the effect of distant lights, and the powerfully atmospheric quality of this picture, are all characteristic of Achenbach’s later style. Also characteristic of his work of the 1870s and 1880s is Achenbach’s preference for everyday subject matter. During this period he largely turned away from the monumental subjects of his earlier Italian paintings, which often depict the architecture and archaeology of Rome, towards an interest in more homely subject matter drawn from the lives of the Neapolitan peasants, fishmongers and bourgeoisie and set against the picturesque backdrop of the Bay of Naples, Capri and the Amalfi Coast.
Achenbach made three visits to the Naples area in 1857, 1871 and 1881, where he made numerous sketches, which were later worked up into larger paintings. The visit of 1857 was decisive in turning him away from the precise and very detailed technique of his early work, where he was largely following the rationalist precepts of his master at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, towards a much more impressionistic style. In contrast to Schirmer’s rational compositional methods and sharpness of detail, atmospheric elements became essential to Achenbach’s work and he started to experiment with ways of conveying the sensation of plein air painting by blending one area of the painting into another. One early example of this transitional period in his work is his Landscape in the Campagna (1855, Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf). Allied to his interest in atmospheric effects, was an increasingly adventurous technique as Achenbach used his fingers and the palette knife to distribute colour and model form. In the mid 1870s, Achenbach’s interest was mainly concentrated on the architecture of Rome and the landscapes of the Roman Campagna, but he also started to take an increasing interest in the colourful city life of Naples as is shown in By the Porta Capuana in Naples of 1875 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and the lives of the contadini in the Bay of Naples. In his later pictures, such as Social Gathering on a Garden Terrace of 1889 (Neue NG Berlin), he overlayed his genre scenes with figures ion fashionable dress to show a very broad range of social types.
The Colnaghi painting, which shows many of the characteristics of these late works, is related to a much smaller oil sketch, (29 x 40cm) which was sold by Lempertz in 1994 (Kunsthaus Lempertz, Aukt 632, November 1994 Lot 1750 [ex catalogue]). The sketch, Nachtliche Strassenzene am Golf Neapel which was published in Potthof’s monograph (Mechthild Potthoff, Oswald Achenbach, sein künstlerishes Wirken zur Hochzeit des Burgertums, Studien zu Leben und Werk, 1995, page 311 colour plate IV) and dated by her 1875-1885, is very similar in general composition, but there are differences in the details, the colouring in the sketch is warmer and the technique is considerably rougher. While the viewpoint and the overall lines of the landscape are almost identical, there are significant differences in the foreground figures and such motifs as the stall selling fish, rendered very swiftly in the sketch, is considerably more evolved in the final canvas. Achenbach seems not to have relied too slavishly on his preliminary sketches, but to have used them as a form of aide mémoire, a starting point for painting. The presence of a substantial number of pentiments, of branches redrawn, and even, in the background, the shape of a figure which has been painted over, shows the extent to which he improvised on the canvas, and the scumbled dots of paint to suggest distant lights and the very broadly painted figures in the foreground, show his increasingly adventurous technique. Typical of Achenbach’s later work is the highly dramatic presentation and theatrical lighting. Like a theatre director he presents a broad range of social types, who include fashionable strollers, middle-class picnickers, fishermen, and vendors of seafood, who are variously lit by the moon, cast in shadow, or silhouetted against the moonlight.
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