Pier Giuseppe Ferrarini

The elongated beach of Finale Ligure, a narrow sandy expanse between the mountains and the sea, is the subject of this very lively painting, still preserved in a rare period frame decorated with golden shells. With a keen spirit of observation, the author, Pier Giuseppe Ferrarini from Parma, uses the elongated format of his canvas to animate the return of the fishermen, who, helped by their women, spread their nets to dry in the sun, with a tireless crowd of children intent on their games.

A child with an extravagant white headdress shoots an arrow from his wooden bow, while a small acrobat covered in a simple blue costume shows off his skill, ignored by his playmates who gaze absorbedly at the sand in search of unexpected treasures. Every detail is seen and described with photographic care, from the fishing floats in the foreground to the smoke that rises from the house in the background.

This is one of the latest works created by Ferrarini, an artistic personality still being studied and often confused with his homonymous and almost contemporary fellow citizen Giuseppe Ferrarini, also due to his untimely death at the age of just thirty-five. A pupil of the Academy of Parma, he had been initiated by Guido Carmignani to landscape and views often accompanied by genre scenes, proving sensitive to the novelty of French experiences imported into his homeland by his master.

During the seventies, his production had undergone a turning point in a realist direction, which had led him to also practice the theme of gender while remaining, however, on light tones and distant from any social denunciation. Moving to Rieti, in 1887 he created a view of the shores of Lake Piediluco with fishing boats, which the same year entered the collections of the Municipality of Parma, which is almost a counterpart to Beach of Final Marina with which he shares not only the subject, but also the elongated format, the presence of a relief placed in the background to close the composition, the care in the representation of details and even the position of the female figures intent on folding the fishing nets that seem to have been made using the same preparatory drawing.

It is one of the rare traced works of Ferrarini, which together with Il Sanctus (1879, Salsomaggiore, Palazzo comunale) highlights his pictorial skills. The Beach of Final Marina, sent to the annual exhibition of the Parma Encouragement Society and won by the sculptor Agostino Ferrarini, was presented at the V National Art Exhibition in Venice together with the missing Ruit Hora by the friends of the artist who has just passed away to honor his memory .

Text by Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto.

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