by Vicente Palmaroli (1834–1896)
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If I had two lives, I’d have lived one permanently at the beach.
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu
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About the painting:
Sitting near the seashore, a lady puts her reading aside for a moment to turn and look out at the spectator. Despite her location out on the beach, she wears a long purple skirt with splendid black lace decoration, a white pinafore, a comfortable shawl and a hat with blond lace and feathers. In her hand she holds a small parasol. She appears to have settled comfortably and sits at a distance from the other holiday-makers and next to a number of rush-bottomed chairs (for resting by the sea), other useful beach items, and a few articles of clothing. Reserved, reading and surprised in her solitude, there is a melancholic, refined air about this female holiday-maker that is greatly in keeping with both the tastes of the European upper-middle class of the last quarter of the 19th century and a stereotype of bourgeois femininity well-known through literature and reflected in a perfectly defined type of art.
Palmaroli often went to the beaches at Trouville-sur-mer, in the Calvados region of Normandy, summering there between 1873 and 1883 in a fashionable location graced by the presence of famous painters and writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Claude Monet and Eugène Boudin – all of whom contributed in their way, as did Palmaroli in his, to passing down the image of the upper echelons of the European bourgeoisie of their time.
Sources:
[1] Original image and description from Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga.
[2] The Real Victorian's digitally enhanced version of the painting (seen above), downloadable as a 9” x 12” @ 300 ppi JPEG.
Here is a video of a walking tour through Trouville-sur-mer,
France's most beautiful fishing village,
(where the painting is supposed to have been set):
Digitally enhanced reproductions of public domain paintings are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.