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Neapolitan Song
1929
Joseph Stella
Born: Muro Lucano, Italy 1877
Died: New York, New York 1946
oil on canvas
38 3/8 x 28 1/4 in. (97.5 x 71.7 cm.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Françoise and Harvey Rambach
2000.11
Smithsonian American Art Museum
2nd Floor, North Wing
Stella believed that every day should "begin and end [with] the painting of a flower." The exotic plants he sketched in the Bronx Botanical Garden resurface in this imaginary scene of the Bay of Naples, drawn with the precision and love of nature that Stella absorbed from Italy's Renaissance painters. The tips of the palmetto leaf radiate across the picture plane like a visible, unfolding wave of sound. Stella had moments of homesickness, when images of his homeland came to him as clearly as when he first arrived in America in 1896. Here, it is as if the Neapolitan song is reaching across the sea, bridging the distance between Stella's old home and his adopted country.
Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
Keywords
Animal - bird
Landscape - mountain
Landscape - plant
painting
paint - oil
fabric - canvas
About Joseph Stella
Born: Muro Lucano, Italy 1877 Died: New York, New York 1946
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