Paradises and Landscapes in the Carmen Thyssen Collection. From Brueghel to Gauguin

31 March - 7 October 2012
Playa de Estepona con la vista del Peñón de Gibraltar
Fritz Bamberger

The Beach at Estepona with a View of the Rock of Gibraltar, 1855

Oil on canvas, 73 x 112.7 cm CTB.1987.9

Painted by Bamberger in Munich after his second trip to Spain, the painting is a combination of various views of the Southern coast of Spain from the beach at Estepona in the province of Malaga to Gibraltar in the distance, dominated by its rock. It is therefore not a topographically accurate view but rather the recreation of the monumental effect, through its breadth and impression of spatial depth, of the far Western part of the Southern Spanish coastline. It is a sort of quintessence of that vast terrain which includes mountains, dunes, marshes, beaches and cliffs and on whose horizon is clearly silhouetted the Rock of Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is one of the most famous natural features of the Iberian peninsular. From the 1770s it was the object of study of British geologists and it was a frequent subject for view painters and illustrators. Bamberger adopted it as one of his favourite, and probably most popular, subjects. By 1851 he had already exhibited in Frankfurt a View of Gibraltarwhich he painted on his return from Spain in 1849. He repeated the subject on numerous occasions. In the Neue Pinakothek in Munich is an oil by Bamberger of 1859 entitled Mountainous Landscape on the Spanish Coast which includes numerous elements taken from the landscape of the Bay of Algeciras and the area round and including Gibraltar. In addition in the Schackgalerie in Munich is a View of Gibraltarin oil of 1863 bought by the Graf von Schack that same year. This depicts sunset in the Straits of Gibraltar with the outskirts of Algeciras in the foreground and the Rock in the background. In addition, the Nelly Louise Luckenbach Collection in Heidelberg has another View of Gibraltar painted by Bamberger in 1865.

The arrangement of the various elements in The Beach at Estepona with a view of the Rock of Gibraltar is quite similar to these above-mentioned paintings, but here the sea opens out on the left hand side rather than on the right of the composition as in the Munich canvases. The celebration of a spectacular natural terrain is, in any event, the common link between this and other canvases by Bamberger. This is not to say that the original physiognomy of the landscape has not been depicted accurately. The painting uses exaggerated solutions, such as the depth of the visual field, which is particularly developed in the painting in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection.

The painting, dominated by a horizontal format and the use of a very high viewpoint, offers a panoramic view of a fragment of nature which is the result of combining numerous elements characteristic of the Andalusian coastline. The artist creates a majestic view of the Mediterranean sky, the strength of its light and its transparency, which enhances the landscape of the foreshortened coastline which extends into a space as immesurable as it is in reality. Colour, light and the vastness of the Mediterranean landscape in its virgin state are undoubtedly the true subjects of this Romantic painting. By using devices such as the piling up of planes which receed without end into the background, the combination of very high viewpoints for the lanand very low ones for the sky, and the contrasts of light, the artist succeeds in conveying the experience of the place, expressed in monumental terms. There is a literary and not just an emotional intent to Bamberger's imposing landscapes, as the Graf von Schack noted with regard to the View of Gibraltar which he bought in 1863: "Even someone who has never been there and does not know the place feels himself transported there by such a work of art, if one gives oneself to it in the right way. In Bamberger's Gibraltar one can look down from above the steep rock to the blue below, between which two seas move between the Columns of Hercules […]". There is a striking relationship between these paintings and those of the Greek coastline by Rottmann, and one can interpret this painting and other landscapes by Bamberger as a transposition of the poetic formulated by Rottmann in his painting of Greece to the depiction of the Spanish Mediterranean. The artist is searching for a corresponding sympathy towards a landscape which is certainly wild but also historic. The presence of architectural elements and of the picturesque figures set up, as it were, opportunities to reflect on the landscape in its present and past.

Javier Arnaldo