Fishing Boats at Capri

In the lower right corner Albert Bierstadt wrote the place and the day, Capri, June 14, 1857. He was 27 and nearing the end of his years of training in Europe. That spring he and his friend Sanford Gifford, another young American landscape painter, had set out from Rome for the south of Italy, travelling mostly on foot with knapsacks and sketching gear. On the 30th of May they crossed by boat from Naples to the island, and they stayed until the 26th of June. Gifford wrote that they spent the time sketching boats, figures and the like, and this is that kind of work, oil on a sheet of paper about half a metre wide, made on a beach where the fishing boats are drawn up on the sand among nets and the people who work them. Studies like this were raw material for pictures finished later in the studio. Two years afterwards, back in America, Bierstadt painted a view of the Marina Piccola, the smaller of Capri's two harbours, and in 1863 he gave it to the new art academy in Buffalo, New York. This sheet he never let go. It was still among his things when he died in 1902.