Fishermen and their Families on the Shore of the Bay of Naples

Aivazovsky signed this canvas at the lower left in Latin letters, with the date 1873. By then he had been living for almost 30 years in Feodosia, his home town on the Crimean coast, and his Italian years lay three decades behind him. He had gone to Italy in 1840 on a travelling scholarship from the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg and worked around Naples, Sorrento and Amalfi before coming home in 1844. The Bay of Naples stayed in his repertoire for the rest of his life. Here it is the setting for fishermen and their families gathered on the shore, a working beach with the bay opening out behind them. The canvas is large, more than one and a half metres across. It came up at an anonymous sale at Christie's in London in November 1981, and the Museum of Fine Arts bought it there.