Umberto Boccioni

In his diary Boccioni describes observing a young man exercising on the beach of the Lido in Venice, and one can assume that the present drypoint was not produced on the basis of a preparatory drawing but scratched onto the plate ‘en pleine aire’, there and then.
It is the spontaneity and the quick pace of his lines, which convey a sense of tension and speed so characteristic for Boccioni’s later works.

Only a very small number of impressions were printed by the artist. Of the present version B, Bellini records only one impression, in a private collection in Geneva. The present impression was not known to him.