Landscape

A painter who gave almost all of his short working life to ships left this one with no ship in it. The sea is a pale strip along the horizon at the left, and everything nearer is dune: a sandy track, clumps of coarse grass turning rust-coloured, a few gulls over the ridge, a flat white sky. In the summer of 1876 he had been at Skagen, on the northern tip of Jutland, where Danish painters had just begun working outdoors on exactly this kind of ground. The canvas is dated the year after, and it belongs to the National Gallery in Athens, which has shown it at its Corfu branch at Kato Korakiana. The signature in the lower left is in Latin letters, J. Altamura, the form of the family name his father used in Italy.