Hans Thoma

Hans Thoma had moved from Munich to Frankfurt at the end of 1876, where his most important collectors, Otto Eiser and Alexander Gerlach, lived – yet his financial situation remained precarious: ‘I myself sell virtually nothing in Frankfurt and would not know how to make ends meet if I had not found a few friends in England who are happy to buy many paintings for little money,’ he admitted at the beginning of 1881. One of these English friends was Charles Minoprio (1838–1895), a native of Frankfurt who had made his fortune in the cotton trade in Liverpool. Thomas’s old friend Otto Scholderer, who had been living in London since 1871, had established the contact, from which a friendship developed. In 1879, Minoprio had purchased a landscape at the Frankfurt Kunstverein and invited Thoma to Liverpool, where the painter visited him in August. From there, Thoma made several excursions to New Brighton, situated at the mouth of the River Mersey, with its beach: ‘to New Brighton, walking along the beach towards Haylake, in strong winds and with the tide rolling in’, Thoma noted in his diary on 25 August. There he sketched and produced several small-format studies (Thode 1909, pp. 130, 131 and 134), but our painting was not created until two years later in the Frankfurt studio. It is a tranquil picture full of depth, in which sky and water are given equal weight – the waves roll diagonally towards the lower edge of the picture and break into small swells with white, rippling crests on the silvery, gleaming beach, whilst the calm sea grows ever greener towards the horizon. There, two large sailing ships seem to float by, the one further away with gleaming white rigging. Above them, dirty-white clouds pile up, from which the blue sky flashes through isolatedly. Simple and clear in composition, Thoma sensitively captures the gentle play of the waves of the northern sea in subdued colours – in this harmonious, silvery-hazy depiction, Thoma stands in stark contrast to, for example, Gustave Courbet’s contemporary seascapes, in which he brings the immense power of the sea to the fore. Thoma’s painting nevertheless made an impression – when it was presented in an exhibition at J. P. Schneider’s art salon in 1899, a reviewer praised the fact that Thoma presented something new with almost every painting: "Who has ever seen a seascape by Thoma? Certainly not many. Here was one on display, a view of the English coast, and an excellent painting at that, observed with such vitality and executed with such confidence as if this artist had never done anything else at all." By this time, the painting had returned to Frankfurt, having previously been in the possession of Charles Minoprio. In 1884, Minoprio had organised the first Thoma exhibition in England at the Liverpool Art Club, featuring works from his own collection and that of his brother-in-law. No. 40 listed in the small exhibition brochure there – Beach at New Brighton – is likely to be identical to our painting, which, following Minoprio’s death in 1895, returned to Frankfurt via the art dealer J. P. Schneider, like most of the Thoma paintings from his collection. Dr Peter Prange