Fishermen on the Beach of Maiori

(Maiori 1867 – 1922)
Having trained in Maiori under his uncle Gaetano Capone and subsequently attended the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Naples, Angelo Della Mura inherited a profound sensitivity for genre and landscape painting, establishing himself as one of the most refined exponents of the Maiori School. In this watercolour sheet, datable to the final decade of the nineteenth century, the artist captures a fragment of coastal life: a group of fishermen is observed at first light sorting their nets on the shore. Formally, the work demonstrates a close stylistic dependence on Capone's pictorial vocabulary, aligning itself with the poetics of truth that characterise such pieces as Fishermen (entry 28), Mother with Child (entry 29), and the watercolour In a Garden in Amalfi (entry 51). Della Mura ennobles the sphere of maritime labour through an empathetic observation, wherein the rigorous atmospheric rendering and the calculated play of light on the shoreline emerge as the true protagonists of the composition.