View of a Harbour

Félix Ziem was a French painter whose entire career centred on Venice and Marseille — cities of water, light, and shipping commerce that provided him with inexhaustible subject matter. His Harbour views, produced in their hundreds from the 1840s through his death in 1911, were enormously popular with French collectors who saw in them a combination of Turner's atmospheric light and the picturesque specificity of Boudin. Ziem's paintings of Venetian and Mediterranean harbours popularised a vision of maritime light that anticipates the Impressionists without fully adopting their technical program.

Ziem's harbour is built around a high-keyed sky reflected in the water below, creating a luminous bilateral symmetry bisected by masts and rigging. His brushwork in the sky is broad and wet, with warm and cool passages blended directly on the canvas, while the vessel hulls are rendered with more controlled, dryer strokes.