En route pour la pêche (1878)

Sargent, John Singer (1856-1925)

En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish)
1878
Oil on canvas, 78.7 × 122.9 cm
National Gallery of ArtWashington

En route pour la pêche depicts a scene in the quiet fishing village of Cancale, on the north coast of Brittany, France. Against the broad beach at low tide, the town’s quay and lighthouse, and cloud-filled blue skies, a group of women and children set out to gather fish and shellfish from shallow pools for their evening dinner. The figures, arranged along the light-dappled shore like figures on a classical frieze, are followed by several more people descending the slipway. John Singer Sargent‘s impressive composition and deft brushwork endow the popular, but often overly sentimentalized, 19th-century subject of everyday peasant life with an unprecedented freshness. While this painting gives an impression of spontaneity and facile execution, Sargent devoted an extraordinary amount of effort to preparing it for the 1878 Paris Salon, a highly regulated annual exhibition. The young artist understood the conservative nature of the Salon and therefore executed the canvas as formally and tightly as possible given his training. Even before the Salon closed, the painting had found a patron, marking the second sale of Sargent‘s career. Born to American parents in Florence, Italy, Sargent studied in Paris in the 1870s at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and with the fashionable French painter Carolus-Duran. During these formative years before his rapid rise to fame as a portraitist, Sargent loved to sketch the sea and coastal life while traveling with his family. The artist began to develop En route pour la pêche, along with a related work in the Museum of Fine ArtsBoston, at age 21. These were his first genre paintings (scenes of everyday life) and, along with their many preparatory works, constituted his first large body of work devoted to one locale. Four women and two children, all with pale skin, carry baskets as they walk along a beach under a brilliant blue sky in this horizontal painting. The scene is painted with visible dabs and blended strokes. The women all wear long-sleeved shirts, calf-length skirts and aprons, head coverings, and gray clogs. The group walks to our left, amid shallow pools that reflect the topaz-blue sky. At the front of the group, to our left, a young woman wears a white kerchief tied at the back of her neck, under her blond hair. She wears a navy-blue shirt and a gray skirt, and she carries a shallow, woven, straw basket against her left hip, closer to us. On her other side, a barefoot child walks beside her. The child wears a white, long-sleeved shirt tucked into tan-colored shorts and a wide-brimmed, golden yellow hat. He holds a basket at the small of his back. To our right, near the center of the composition, a pair of women walk with their heads tipped toward each other. The woman closer to us has bright, copper-blond hair under a white bonnet tied under her chin. A black shawl crosses over her white shirt, and black coverings are pulled up over the forearms of her white shirt. Her beige apron mostly obscures her crimson-red skirt. Wearing dark stockings, she is the only woman whose shins are not bare. The woman next to her, farther from us, wears a dark gray head covering and skirt, and a navy-blue shirt. The chin straps on the bonnets of both of these women flutter in the breeze. Behind that pair, to our right, and older woman also wears a black shawl and sleeve protectors over a white shirt. Her apron is aquamarine blue and she lifts it over a brown skirt. She has stopped to gaze down at the second child, standing next to her. Sunlight sets the child’s blond hair aglow as he reaches down to tug at the leg of his dark gray shorts. He wears a teal-blue, long-sleeved shirt and is also barefoot. Touches of white paint on the beach around the group makes the sand seem to shimmer. More people approach the beach from the upper right corner, where the dune leads back to a lighthouse. The structure is a hazy, slate-gray silhouette against the bright white clouds in the vivid blue sky above. The beach slopes down to our left into the distance, where sailboats and people are suggested with a few swipes of paint. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right corner, “John S. Sargent. Paris 1878.” (NGA)

See also:

• Bretagne (France)