"The Marina Piccola, Capri," Albert Bierstadt (1859)

Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Albert Bierstadt,

The Marina Piccola, Capri, 1859

Bierstadt's oil painting is a coastal landscape three and a half feet high and six feet long. A sandy beach runs the length of the picture's immediate foreground. At left, the beach curves into the background and to the right where it gradually becomes a rocky cliftside that at one point juts three quarters of the painting's height into the sky. These cliffs continue on in the painting's background, curving back across the painting's middle and forming a bay.

At left, the sky is blue with scattered, cottony clouds. And the indigo ocean water is calm, lapping against the shore. A group of people has congregated in the bottom left corner: a woman holds a child in her arms, a man props himself on his elbow, a boy in shorts struggles to carry a round basket. A man in a red vest stands with his back to us, and props his left hand on his hip. Behind them, brown fishing nets are stretched to dry over branches stuck upright in the sand. Behind them, at the water's edge, a man examines a few fishing boats pulled onto the sand.

On the beach in the middle of the painting, three people sit mending a large fishing net, which lays square and flat on the sand. More bundled fishing nets spill from a boat pulled up onto the beach to their right. Behind them, four men knee-deep in the surf, push a boat onto the beach. Still rowing in the water to their right, another group of men navigate choppy waves.

On the painting's right-hand side, the sky is dark with storm clouds. Still in the bay, another boat approaching shore leans to the left, its two small sails full of wind. In the far distance on the right, another boat struggles on the horizon, so far out that it is barely visible. Surf pounds against a few rocks near the beach in the front right-hand corner.