The Fishing Boat  1865

Courbet painted this work during an intensely productive visit to Trouville with James McNeill Whistler from September until November 1865; in a letter to his father, the artist boasted that he had executed "thirty-five paintings" in a very short time, which "stunned everybody." In his choice of subject, Courbet followed in the wake of Eugène Isabey, Johan Barthold Jongkin...