“A line of sea appears and the small, white figure of a Greek philosopher in a tunic on a deserted beach. I will confess that I owe this idea of the Greek philosopher in a white tunic on the shore of a resounding sea to de Chirico.”

Natura morta marina con conchiglie (Marine Still Life with Shells) is a work by Filippo de Pisis: writer, poet and scholar, he began painting after World War I, drawing influence from Metaphysical art before developing his own personal and unmistakable style. Shown in an exhibition at the Galleria Civica, Campione d’Italia, in 1996 and auctioned in 2007, Natura morta con conchiglie did not appear again in public and it is still unknown whose hands it passed through before arriving in the Costantini Collection in Rome, the last ascertained owner prior to the Cerruti Collection. The subject was instead often addressed by Filippo de Pisis, whose oeuvre includes numerous marine still lifes in which large, everyday objects appear in the foreground on a beach. 

The artist’s first still life with shells dates from 1916 and his meeting with Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, who were then laying the foundations of Metaphysical painting in Ferrara. This consisted at the time of commonplace objects in an invented space, an extremely limpid representation of things within an unreal iconographic system. In the same way, the subjects recurrently addressed by de Pisis are always ordinary, concrete elements, like the shells that jar with reality by virtue of their disproportionately large size. Another precise reference to de Chirico is found in the customary small figure in the background, little more than a dab of paint. De Pisis acknowledged this citation in describing his Pani gloriosi (Glorious Breads) in 1938: “A line of sea appears and the small, white figure of a Greek philosopher in a tunic on a deserted beach. I will confess that I owe this idea of the Greek philosopher in a white tunic on the shore of a resounding sea to de Chirico.”¹ 

The connection with Metaphysical art accounts only partially, however, for the numerous marine still lifes that de Pisis produced in 1924 and above all as from 1925, after he moved to Paris and came into contact with the work of Édouard Manet. It is from the latter’s Sur la plage (On the Beach) that he probably derived the structure of these paintings, including the one in question here, where the line of the horizon, marked out by its deeper colour, divides the space into two parts: the sky, with gulls suggested by quick brushstrokes, and the beach, on which two enormous pink shells lie. 

While presenting themselves as frenzied strokes of paint on the canvas, the shells still maintain the solidity of form typical of the works produced in 1927, as do the beach and the sky. This was a period of transition for de Pisis, when the still life steeped in metaphysical riddles and mystery came under the influence of French painting, from Jean-Baptiste Chardin to Manet and the Impressionists, and he gradually assimilated the quick, fragmentary style that was to become his hallmark. Only a few details of this canvas, such as the flying gulls and the figure of the philosopher, look forward to the disintegration and rapidity typical of the artist’s work in the 1930s. 

As de Pisis himself attested in 1931, however, the value of his still lifes is not solely pictorial and constructional but also a matter of intimate, lyrical feeling: “These are not simply shells, pieces of fruit and objects on the shore. The sea is sometimes a purely lyrical element […] A kind of fever overcomes me when I have laid down the colours of the shells in the foreground and have to paint the background. What matters is the air, where these chromatic values, shells, pieces of fruit and various objects, must breathe and come to life.”² 

Giulia Toso 

¹ De Pisis 1938, pp. 262-264. 

² Id. 1996, pp. 102, 105.