Among the foremost landscape painters of the Düsseldorf school, the German artist Oswald Achenbach studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. During early study trips to Bavaria in 1843 and northern Italy and Switzerland in 1845, he developed his atmospheric and naturalistic approach to landscape. In 1850 Achenbach travelled to Rome and the Campagna, and from then on the Italian landscape became his primary subject matter. Achenbach’s taste for the picturesque and his facility as a colourist allowed him to create plein-air landscapes replete with detail and harmony. During a further stay in Rome and Naples in 1871, Achenbach became increasingly concerned with architecture and genre elements, painting Roman monuments and the colourful city life of Rome and Naples.

In the following decade his interest shifted to the area around Naples, Sorrento and Capri, as can be seen in this wondrously atmospheric view of the Bay of Naples. Indeed, the Italian vedute are among the most popular subjects of the artist’s oeuvre, often enriched with particular traits of everyday life and immersed in the evocative light of a sunset or the moon. A calm and idyllic aura permeates this painting, capturing the magic of a late summer afternoon in Southern Italy.

Achenbach's mastery of the tonal subtleties of the Italian light were key to achieving his keen sense of atmospherics. The colours are applied pure. In order to capture the typically blinding light effects of southern Italy the artist often used carmine white, employing darker tonalities to strengthen the luminosity of the scene. The dominant colours in the present canvas are browns, yellows and greens in the foreground; ashen whites towards the centre of the scene constitute the luministic fulcrum, together with the white of the pelt of the horse that meanders up the path in the foreground. The colours of the background, used to render the sea, the cloudy sky and smoking Vesuvius, play on tonalities of greys, blues and pinks.

Achenbach’s landscapes always take an extraordinarily wide view, offering the spectator a sense of infinity. In executing his vedute, Achenbach employed a number of expressive methods discovered in the nineteenth century: photography, panoramas and dioramas. Such instruments offered the means by which his landscapes became novel visual experiences, in which the spectator has the illusion of finding themselves in the centre of the painting. The viewpoint of the present canvas, with Vesuvius in the background, is one of the preferred views captured by Achenbach around Naples. The theme of the track often returns in the artist’s production; it constitutes not only a privileged place of observation in everyday life, but also gives a profound depth to the scene and directs the gaze of the spectator towards the centre of the work.

The Cypress trees are another recurring element of the German artist’s works: in the works of this period the vegetation still has a preponderant role with respect to human presence. The visual prominence assumed by the plants in the foreground, skilfully playing on the tonal infinities of the greens and browns, relegates the four people on the roof of the building to the left of the path and those on the balcony of the white house to bit parts in the scene, when, for example, in a work executed almost ten years later, On the Terrace at Posillipo (100 x 72 cm) owned by Cocoon Art, Milan, the people in the foreground assume the roles of protagonists.