Starting in the early 2000s, Schnabel began making different series that explore the use of digitally printed imagery in conversation with his extensive vocabulary of mark-making and painted shapes. With the Capri Paintings, Schnabel has digitally printed on large-scale images from old postcards of Capri featuring emblematic architectural sites and natural features around the island: the ruins at Villa Jovis, the Grotta Azzurra, the Faraglioni rocks. The succinct white marks executed with gesso, a reoccurring trait of the artist’s oeuvre, reappear in the four paintings in the series.

This artwork belongs to a series of works by Julian Schnabel, created on the island of Capri between 2008 and 2009. It recounts the island’s most restless and mysterious sides. The works recall the fiery landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the mystical and silent symbolism of Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead, the dark and visionary canvases of Karl Wilhem Diefenbach—even certain dense and suspended aspects of Werner Herzog's cinema. The cathartic breakthrough lies in the candid brushstrokes that illuminate, like glimpses of light, a landscape bathed in a palette of brass and leaden greys.