The Murmur of Beaches

They had always existed, on the edges of certain seaside cities, those miniature domestic Saharas. No one visited them: to walk their length would have meant trudging laboriously only to return home with shoes full of sand; but then, one day, they filled up with people, albeit intermittently and seasonally. The health benefits of sea bathing, sun and salt air had been discovered by a select few. Moses Levy (1884-1946) was born in Tunis and moved with his family at the age of ten to Tuscany, where he studied under the elderly Giovanni Fattori among others. But the subject he chose for his painting, in the years leading up to the First World War, was a gay new way of life: that of the beaches. For the fashionable elite, it was a golden age of seaside holidays throughout Versilia. It was also a golden age for Levy’s painting, and he joyfully depicted that world of cosmopolitan migrants.