Evening Calm, Concarneau, Opus 220 (Allegro Maestoso)

1891

Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 81.3 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fishing boats rest on a still evening sea beyond rounded coastal rocks. Here the dot method is carried out onto open water.

The opus number and musical subtitle suggest the series works like a symphony, with each canvas one movement of a larger piece.
It belongs to a group of five related views of fishing boats off Concarneau.
One boat with a raised sail stands out against a row of distant sails.
Precise hues sit in separate strokes, which he compared to brightly colored lights.
It came to the Met with the Robert Lehman Collection in 1975.

The harbor lies on the coast of Brittany. The painter was a social anarchist, and two curators in a museum lecture read its fishing cooperatives as the harmony anarchists hoped for.

Divisionism: The working practice of separating color into individual strokes or dots.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · CC0