Summer Days, Vicente Palmaroli from the old master collection

Summer Days, Vicente Palmaroli

Sitting near the seashore, a lady puts her reading aside for a moment to turn and look out at the spectator. Despite her location out on the beach, she wears a long purple skirt with splendid black lace decoration, a white pinafore, a comfortable shawl and a hat with blond lace and feathers. In her hand she holds a small parasol. She appears to have settled comfortably and sits at a distance from the other holiday-makers and next to a number of rush-bottomed chairs (for resting by the sea), other useful beach items, and a few articles of clothing. Reserved, reading and surprised in her solitude, there is a melancholic, refined air about this female holiday-maker that is greatly in keeping with both the tastes of the European upper-middle class of the last quarter of the 19th century and a stereotype of bourgeois femininity well-known through literature and reflected in a perfectly defined type of art. This was a form of iconography which Palmaroli explored on a truly successful commercial basis.

In the late 19th century, going down to the beach in clothing more suited to walking, as the lady in this canvas has done, was considered the height of sophistication. In fact dressing elegantly at the seaside became a sign of true distinction only a short time after this picture was painted.