The Poor Fisherman

1881

Oil on canvas, 154.7 × 192.5 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A thin man stands with bowed head in a moored boat on a grey shore. Little happens in the scene, and its stillness sets the tone.

The color is pale and flat, with almost no modeling, and the forms are kept simple. Younger painters, among them Seurat, Gauguin, Denis and Picasso, admired the result.
It made its debut at the Salon, where it found no buyer and divided opinion.
Look past the boat: a figure gathers flowers while a baby lies on the grass.
Critics attacked its odd perspective and greenish palette.
The French State bought it in 1887, its first purchase of a work by the painter.

The figures are a widowed fisherman and his two children, a theme with Biblical echoes. It hung in the Musée du Luxembourg until 1929, then the Louvre.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-Art