Playa Cabanal

Description

A canvas of generous, horizontal proportion sets the terms for this picture before a single figure or boat comes into focus: the wide format echoes the long sweep of shoreline it depicts, inviting the eye to travel slowly across sand, water, and sky rather than settle on one point. Stand before it and the composition does the work a beach itself does, opening outward, asking for unhurried looking.

About Playa Cabanal

Playa Cabanal depicts the Cabanyal beach district on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, a subject that reflects the extensive travels of Mathias J Alten through the sun-washed towns of southern Europe in the early twentieth century. The scene gathers the familiar elements of a working shoreline, open sand, the suggestion of fishing boats drawn up near the water, figures moving at the edge of the surf, all set beneath the broad, bleaching light that Mediterranean painters of the period returned to again and again.

Alten worked in the plein air tradition, carrying his easel outdoors to register light and atmosphere as they actually appeared rather than as memory or convention dictated. Here that method yields a high-keyed palette: silvery blues in the sea, warm ochres in the sand, and a sky rendered with the loose, confident brushwork that plein air practice demands when the light will not hold still. The picture belongs to a body of coastal work in which Alten treated Mediterranean travel as a subject in its own right, testing his palette against a brightness that northern light rarely offers.

Commissioning this oil painting reproduction means owning a handmade oil painting rather than a printed facsimile. A trained ByMuseum artist paints the composition by hand in oil on canvas, matching the palette Alten used and preserving the visible brushwork and surface texture that carry the light across sand and sea. The result is a painted object with real depth of colour, not a flat reproduction, hand-painted by a professional artist who has studied the original closely.

The hand-painted reproduction

Hung where afternoon light reaches it, in a hallway, a dining room, or above a sofa that faces west, the picture keeps something of the warmth it was painted to hold, a quiet register of coastal brightness that shifts gently with the light of the room through the day.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, not a print or poster
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation
• Certificate of authenticity included
• Free worldwide shipping, with no shipping charge to any country