Thomas Fearnley

Thomas Fearnley was born in Norway (until 1814 part of the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway), the grandson of an emigrated Yorkshireman. After training in Copenhagen and Stockholm, he moved to Dresden in 1828 and became the pupil of his fellow countryman Johan Christian Dahl. There, Fearnley also met the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Both, Dahl and Friedrich, remained an inspiration throughout Fearnley’s career. He travelled widely, in Germany, Italy, Switzerland and France, and returned to his home country only three times thereafter. Fearnley’s work consists of oil sketches, often prepared out of doors and completed in the studio, and larger, more finished compositions,  mainly for exhibitions. In 1836-38 he visited England, spending time in London, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy, and in the Lake District. He died in Munich from typhus, aged 39.   [from National Galleries of Scotland catalogue note]

Fearnley arrived in Sicily in the summer of 1833 and remained until 1835.  While there he mostly painted in small towns to the south of Naples, including Sorrento.  

Our painting is in oil on paper laid down on an oak panel, a support he frequently used for smaller works.  It is a highly detailed and finished view at Sorrento, painted looking across the port from a viewpoint above the beach and can be dated to 1833 or 1834.  It could be that his slightly larger and more contrived picture The painter and the boy, which incorporates a very similar version of the port in the background, was painted later wholly or in part in his studio.  The National Museum gives the date of that picture as 1834.  It was probably a work he painted for exhibition.