Coastal Scene with Fishing Boats

Coastal Scene with Fishing Boats from 1828 is one of Bonington's final paintings before his death from tuberculosis in September of that year at age twenty-five. Even in his last months, Bonington continued to paint the marine subjects that had established his international reputation. Bonington, who died at twenty-five in 1828, achieved a technical mastery of watercolor and oil that astonished contemporaries including Delacroix, with whom he shared a Paris studio and who acknowledged his profound influence on the development of French Romantic painting. The fishing boats of the French coast were among his most familiar subjects — humble vessels that he transformed through atmospheric light into images of extraordinary painterly beauty. Now at the Palazzo Falson in Malta, this late work demonstrates that even as his health failed, Bonington's eye for coastal light and his confidence in rendering it remained undiminished, and his final paintings retain the sparkling freshness that had distinguished his work from the very beginning of his career.

The fishing boats and coastal setting are rendered with fluid, confident brushwork, the atmospheric effects of light on water achieved through transparent glazes over a luminous ground.