Isle of Capri: The Faraglionis. William Stanley Haseltine
Oil on canvas
83 x 142 cm. (32 11/16 x 55 7/8 in.)
frame: 97.8 x 158.8 x 5.1 cm. (38 1/2 x 62 1/2 x 2 in.)
Princeton University,
gift of the Butler Family PP303
The Faraglioni is the collective name for three "stacks" (steep rock columns isolated by erosion from nearby coastline) that rise to a height of over three hundred feet off the southeastern coast of Capri. They represented ideal subjects for William Stanley Haseltine, whose fascination with rock formations led the prominent art critic Henry Tuckerman to observe: "Few of our artists have been more conscientious in the delineation of rocks; their form, superficial traits, and precise tone are given with remarkable accuracy." Haseltine’s interest was rooted in the broader contemporary concern with geology, notably as advanced by Louis Agassiz and his son, Alexander, both active at Harvard and known to Haseltine from his student days there during the 1850s. Also influential was the critic John Ruskin, whose advocacy of "truth to nature" accorded with Haseltine’s own statement that "Every real artist is also a scientist." Following extensive delineations of the New England littoral, Haseltine focused his attention on Italy, especially its coastal regions, eventually settling in Rome in 1874. Responding to the grandeur of the surrounding scenery, and to an increased preoccupation with light effects, his work took on a more sweeping, dramatic scale. In The Faraglioni, like other images completed around the Amalfi coast, the diminutive boats and figures invest the depicted rocks, rising out of a colorful, glassy sea, with a heightened power and exotic presence, at once distinct and descended from the artist’s earlier, more literal productions. As a visitor to his studio in 1870 noted: "No one can give you a more poetical version on canvas of this southern Italian sea shore than Haseltine."
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