Art Beyond Sight: Handbook

"View Of Cadaques With Shadow Of Mount Pani" (1917)

Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

Fifteen inches high and nineteen inches wide, this impressionist oil painting is on burlap, with the fabric's coarse texture still showing beneath the paint. A panoramic landscape, the coastal fishing town of Cadaques occupies the center of the canvas and is seen from above and from a distance -- from a hill outside of town, perhaps. An orange light entering from the top left bathes the village's white buildings crowded together at the rim of a serene blue bay. The rugged coastline, washed in orange light, continues in the distance to the top left. The mountain, which figures in the name of this painting, Mt. Pani, is out of view, but its shadow entering at the left casts a contrasting darkness over the bottom half of the painting. In the foreground, the earthy brown color of lowlands is obscured by the green and brown of trees on a hill. One tree-the closest one to us and on right-reaches upward toward the top of the painting where its green foliage meets an orange sky.

Salvador Dalí loved his Mediterranean homeland and painted it repeatedly throughout his career. He was thirteen years old when he painted this view of Cadaques, the small fishing and resort town where the Dalí family spent its summers. The young Salvador taught himself how to paint in the impressionist style, using dabs of unmixed oil paint to create his images. The burlap on which he painted was easy to get Cadaques. The village fishermen used it to keep the wood of their boats moist when they pulled them up on the beach in the evening. For Dali, swaths of the sacking cut from the boats were a constant supply of canvas.