Lot 52 Dα

Goethe eternalised his trip to Naples in writing. Hackert was court painter there, so all young landscape artists knew the artistic significance of the city before they made the journey to Italy. But there was one thing that they couldn't prepare for before their arrival, and that was the sensation of overwhelm that they experienced upon arriving in the Gulf of Naples for the first time. This was exactly what happened to the young Oswald Achenbach:

“When my father talked about his initial arrival in Naples, he always relived the same excitement again. 'I will never', he said, 'forget the impression that I felt when I first landed in the harbour at Naples! None of my later paintings were able to truly live up to that overwhelming glory. The sky, the beach, the sea, Mount Vesuvius, they all possessed colours that I had never seen anywhere before.” (from the German in: Caecilie Achenbach: Oswald Achenbach in Kunst und Leben, Cologne 1912, p. 12.)

Thus it was only natural that views of Naples would become a central motif in Oswald Achenbach's oeuvre. The city offered him everything he was looking for as a landscape painter: Its softly curved bay; the volcano rising majestically in the distance and occasionally still active; picturesque alleyways and squares populated by fishermen, merchants, craftsmen and flaneurs. Here, Achenbach has gathered them all together by the bay, where the fishermen are watching a puppet show at the end of a long day. Our gaze wanders along the broad strip of coastline into the distance, where the people and houses become mere specks of shimmering colour. Vesuvius with its twin peaks crowns the horizon, illuminated by the light of the evening sun that bathes everything in a powdery red, those colours that the artist 'had never seen anywhere before'.