Félix COTTRAU   (Paris 1799 – 1852)
Pêche aux flambeaux, scène napolitaine (Fishing by Torchlight, Naples)
Oil on paper, laid down on canvas
10 x 8 inches /  25.4 x 19.7 cm.
Signed Cottrau on rock, lower left; inscriptions to stretcher
Literature
Bellier-Auvray, Dictionaire, pp297-298
Civilità dell’Ottocento a Napoli, Ed. Electa, 1997, p446
Exhibited
Paris Salon, 1827
 
Félix Cottrau trained as a painter in Paris, where he quickly became a court painter within  Napoléon's circle. He was patronised by Queen Hortense, Napoléon's step-daughter, in Rome and Arenenberg Castle on Lake Constance, when his work at primarily showed the influence of sentimental painters such as Boilly. However, in the mid-1820s he traveled to Naples, where his art was quickly transformed.
Here he was inspired by the tradition of illuminated night painting that had arisen in the wake of the series of eruptions of Mount Etna during the late 18th century. Travelling painters such as Volaire and Wright of Derby, who had witnessed these eruptions first-hand in the 1770s, had popularised such sensational nocturnal subjects.
Cottrau was immediately inspired by the pictorial possibilites of this genre. In 1824 he painted Fishermen under the Castle dell'Ovo  - a similar subject but with the mediaeval Neapolitan castle looming over the boat to the right (private collection, Rome), with another large version following in 1826 (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). In our painting the drama of the torch-lit fishermen lurching in their boat is answered by the eerie, proto-symbolist group of statues towering over them on the shore.
Cottrau gained his first acceptances at the Paris Salon in 1827 with the present painting and An interior View of the Grotto of Posillippo, both of which had been executed in Naples, and for which he won two Second Class Medals. Such was Cottrau's sense of success with the theme of fire at night that he continued to deploy it in other subjects for many years, such as his Ceremony in Honour of the Victims of 1830 (Musée Carnavalet, Paris) where a series of flaming torches dramatically illuminate a church before a crowd of silhouetted onlookers