Bay of Naples, Evening

Renoir left Paris in the middle of October 1881 and spent about three months in Italy, stopping in Venice, Rome and Naples. He was 40 and already a leading Impressionist, yet the trip unsettled him. In Rome the frescoes of Raphael at the Villa Farnesina stopped him cold, and he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel back in Paris that he had finally seen the Raphaels. Soon after, his loose Impressionist touch began to harden into firmer outlines. He painted the Bay of Naples twice, once in morning light and once, as here, in the evening. The two were confused with each other for years. He fills the foreground with ordinary Neapolitan life, boats and a woman carrying a load on her head, while far off the smoke of Vesuvius drifts over the water.