Seascape

This painting belongs to a series of seascapes, painted at Praia das Maçãs, which Malhoa frequently visited with his wife in the last years of her life, of which the most important one is the beautiful painting At the Seaside from the Museu do Chiado. A man of the countryside, but deeply passionate and visceral about nature, he could not fail to be moved by the intensity of the Atlantic Ocean, which he captures in the movement of a wave breaking over the rocks. This blue and white elegy is treated as a powerful, almost photographic snapshot, in which the energy of the foreground, arranged on the left of the composition, becomes calmer (but without any loss of emotion) against the background, in the clearly defined frontier between the sea and the sky.
Malhoa enjoyed challenges that enabled him to exercise his artistic expertise, in which he believed most profoundly, and, during these years that marked the onset of old age, he seems to have devoted himself to proving to his audience that he was still capable of being modern, adopting a brighter palette of colours and looser and more constructive brushstrokes. The naturalist regime that was his own particular world did not change in any way with experiments such as this one. Instead, it was undoubtedly enriched in the suggestion of a dialogue with other pictorial systems, namely that of the impressionist tradition.
Raquel Henriques da Silva