The Meadows Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas has announced their acquisition of Beach at Portici, a work that was on display at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago and the final painting of 19th century Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874).
The American Exhibit of art occupied 24,000 square feet of space in the northeastern part of the Palace of Fine Arts at the Columbian Exposition. One section was devoted to foreign masterpieces owned by citizens of the United States. “Considered one of the most important international exhibitions of the 19th century,” writes the Meadows Museum, “these works were selected to show off to the Fair’s wide audiences—more than 27 million people visited during its six-month run—the richness and breadth of paintings owned by American collectors and museums, and implicitly, American economic prowess, and refined taste in fine art.” Included in this “Loan Collection of Foreign Masterpieces Owned in the United States” was Beach at Portici, a “nearly finished” large (27 x 51.25 in.) oil on canvas from 1874.
Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (Spanish, 1838–1874), Beach at Portici, 1874. [Image from the Meadows Museum.]
“One other notable picture in the loan collection which must be mentioned at greater length is Fortuny’s Beach at Portici, Italy. In the treatment of the sky this is one of the most wonderfully beautiful pictures in the entire collection. The blue is perfectly exquisite and luminous with the beauty of light and atmosphere. The clouds that float in it are as delicate and light as swans’ down. There are many of these small, fleecy clouds, and their brilliant light is well balanced against the deeper tone of the blue. The sea below them is bluer yet, and lends still another charming note to this harmony of color, while the foreground, with the beach of glistening sand, the brightly dressed figures indistinctly outlined and beautifully mingled with flowers and trees about and behind them, is perhaps as charming as any other part of the picture.”
Beach at Portici, along with Fortuny’s The Dead Toreador, were on loan to the World’s Columbian Exposition by Cornelia Stewart Smith Butler (1846-1915). Her husband, Prescott Hall Butler (1848-1901), served as a lawyer for the firm of McKim, Mead & White, which designed the Agriculture Building on the fairgrounds. The Butlers were New York neighbors and friends of Charles McKim. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, World’s Fair Director of Sculptures, created a sculpture of the Butler’s two boys in 1881. The Meadows Museum confirms that Beach at Portici “was acquired by the prominent New York collector Alexander Turney Stewart in 1875, and remained with Stewart’s heirs on the East Coast until the Meadows acquired it.” The Butlers were relatives of Stewart.
Beach at Portici was placed on view at the Meadows Museum on January 19. From June 24 through September 23, 2018, the painting will be the subject of a focused exhibition, “At the Beach: Mariano Fortuny y Marsal and William Merritt Chase.”