The Island of Capri, the pearl of the Mediterranean Sea, became a refuge for Sylvester Shchedrin during the last decade of his life. The painter was drawn there by ‘the healthy air, the kind people and the excellent wine.’ Thanks to surviving letters written by Shchedrin, it is possible to reconstruct the chronology of his sojourns on Capri: from June to July 1827, from June to early August 1828, and possibly a couple of days at the beginning of August 1830.

The present work features a view from Capri’s southern coast onto the Faraglioni, the famous cliffs just off the island. In the background, on the right, out of the depth of the sea, rise three chalk stacks, each of which has its own name: Faraglione di terra, Faraglione di mezzo, and Faraglione di fuori. The artist chose the low viewpoint from Marina Piccolo on purpose to accentuate the majestic beauty of the cliffs and stacks.

The present work is a smaller version of the painting Fishermen on Capri with the Faraglioni in the Background from 1827 (43 by 62cm), now in a private collection in Moscow (fig.1) and recently published by the State Russian Museum (Silvestr Shchedrin i shkola Pozilippo, St Petersburg, 2016, ill.55).

Shchedrin’s working methods are well known. As he put it himself, he painted ‘everything from nature, which required a lot of time’ (S.Shchedrin, Pis’ma iz Italii, Moscow, Leningrad, 1932, p.214). Back in his studio, he would add figures, which he had also drawn from life in his sketchbooks. He would often paint these figures based on people he had observed directly on top of the finished paint layer, and sometimes he would fill spaces he had marked on the canvas. A similar figure of an Italian woman seen from the back and holding a distaff also appears in Shchedrin’s The Harbour of Mergellina in Naples (State Russian Museum, 1827) and View of Sorrento (State Tretyakov Gallery, 1826).

The appearance at auction of this work from Sylvester Shchedrin’s late period presents collectors with the rare opportunity to acquire one of his paintings.

We are grateful to Dr Lyudmila Markina, Head of the Department of 18th-mid 19th Century Russian Painting at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow for providing this catalogue note.