Work accompanied by authentic writing by Christine Farese Sperken dated 29 June 2006

The theme of the marina, the marina with boats, the stormy sea, recurs in De Nittis' work since his Apulian and Neapolitan beginnings as demonstrated, among others, by some paintings in the De Nittis Municipal Pinacoteca Museum in Barletta (see also Giuseppe De Nittis. Dipinti 1864-1884, exhibition catalogue, edited by R. Bossaglia, Ch. Farese Sperken, G. Matteucci, R. Monti, Milano-Bari 1990, pp. 148-149).Closely linked to the theme of the navy is the study of clouds, observed from reality, which have always - as Edmond de Goncourt also recalls in his Journal - exerted a particular fascination on the artist.In the painting On the Beach the motifs of the sea and the sky, which create the atmosphere of a melancholy day, perhaps at the end of summer, are subordinated to the subject main one which is composed of two women sitting on a chair on the sand, a hunting dog with long black and white fur and a rudimentary wooden structure in disuse, of rather large dimensions, whose original function is not very clear; perhaps it served, covered by a tarpaulin, as a shelter from the sun and prying eyes.Typical for De Nittis is the composition of the two women accompanied by a dog, a composition that recurs in numerous versions; I will simply mention the Dog Walk, 1874 and On the bench at the Bois de Boulogne (nn. 29, 64, in Giuseppe De NittisOn the beach, unpublished, is a work by the painter Giuseppe De Nittis (Barletta 1846 - Saint Germain-en-Laye 1884): also the signature, placed in bottom right, clear and typical, in my opinion, authentic and contemporary with the painting which was probably painted in the second half of the 1870s.