View Of The Bay Of Capri - Oil On Canvas - About 1880 - Signed

I. BERNARDI (active circa 1870-1900, Italian school)
View of the Bay of Capri
Oil on canvas
Signed lower left: I. Bernardi
Circa 1880
Dimensions: 35 × 23.5 cm (canvas) - 38.5 × 25.5 cm (with frame)

With a single glance, this small painting captures the incomparable light of the Gulf of Naples: a limpid blue-green bay, fishermen's boats motionless on the calm water, a front of ochre and golden houses stretching along the shore, and dominating it all, the limestone cliffs of Capri set against a clear sky. The composition, taken at a slight height from the rocks, embraces in a single breath the rocky foreground, the lively seaside and the spectacular mass of the mountain.

The treatment of southern light - vast, luminous sky, calm water rendered in its flat hues, architectural materials rendered with precision - is in keeping with the great tradition of 19th-century Neapolitan veduta, whose plein-air landscape painters made Capri and its environs a favorite subject.

Frame: period or slightly later gilded rod, in good condition.
Condition: very good. Canvas on fixed stretcher, back of old fine-grained canvas typical of Italian production in the second half of the 19th century.

Artist's note: The signature I. Bernardi does not yet correspond to any painter listed in the dictionaries of nineteenth-century Italian artists consulted. Nevertheless, the work testifies to a real technical mastery and intimate knowledge of the site, suggesting an author trained in the milieu of landscape artists active around Naples in the second half of the 19th century.