Clearing Up--Coast of Sicily

Description Beginning in the 1820s, the academy in Düsseldorf, a town on the Rhine River, began to attract artists from other German cities and from abroad. Achenbach, one of Düsseldorf's most influential painters in the mid-19th century, specialized in the "sublime" mode of landscape painting, in which man is dwarfed by nature's might and fury. At the left the evening sunlight breaks through the stormy sky to illuminate the turbulent sea breaking against the rocky coast. Seagulls struggle to fly in the violent wind. The only signs of human presence are a spar embedded in the rocks, a wooden keg adrift at the right, and a barely discernible flag. The tattered American flag on the rocks in the foreground implies that there is a shipwreck just out of view.

Conservation

Date	Description	Narrative
8/10/1972	Treatment	varnish removed; surface cleaned; lined; inpainted; coated
3/16/1978	Treatment	cleaned
9/08/1983	Examination	examined for consdition
7/31/1992	Treatment	other
2/02/1994	Treatment	other
4/18/1994	Treatment	other
5/08/1995	Loan Consideration	examined for loan
5/09/1995	Treatment	other
5/08/1996	Treatment	other
1/10/1998	Loan Consideration	examined for loan
10/02/1998	Treatment	other

Exhibitions

• German 19th Century Paintings and Drawings. The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. 1983.
• Savings Bank of Baltimore Special Display. The Savings Bank of Baltimore, Baltimore. 1984.
• Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 2000-2001.
• From Rye to Raphael: The Walters Story. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. 2014-2016.

Provenance The Düsseldorf Gallery, New York [John Godfrey Boker, proprietor], 1849-1857; Cosmopolitan Art Association of Sandusky, Ohio, 1857-1862 [mode of acquisition unknown]; John Wolfe [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; John Wolfe Sale, New York, 1882, no. 91; William T. Walters, Baltimore, 1882, by purchase; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1894, by inheritance; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Inscriptions [Signature] In black on lower left: A. Achenbach; [Date] In black on lower left: 1847

Credit Acquired by William T. Walters, 1863 (?)