Massa, Bay of Naples

Massa, Bay of Naples was painted in 1864 during Brett's extended Italian journey, a period that had transformative effects on his palette and his understanding of Mediterranean light. The Bay of Naples, with its exceptional atmospheric clarity and the dramatic backdrop of Vesuvius, had been a standard destination for British landscape painters since the eighteenth century, but Brett applied his Pre-Raphaelite exactness to a subject that most of his predecessors had treated with Romantic generalisation. The luminosity of southern Italian light pushed Brett toward a brighter, more saturated palette than he had used in his Swiss or English subjects. John Ruskin had recommended Italy as a corrective to the greyness of northern painting, and Brett's Italian paintings show him responding to that advice with characteristic methodical thoroughness.

The Mediterranean palette is noticeably warmer and more intensely blue than Brett's northern coastal paintings. Sunlit water in the Bay of Naples has a different optical character from English coastal waters, and Brett attempts to render the specific quality of Mediterranean chromatic intensity. The volcanic shape of Vesuvius provides an unusual geological backdrop for his characteristic geological attentiveness.