Setting Out to Fish

A barefoot procession moves across the wet sand at low tide: women in white caps and aprons, wicker baskets balanced on hips and shoulders, small children trailing behind. The place is Cancale, a village on the coast of Brittany famous for its oyster beds, and these are the women who waded out twice a day to harvest them. John Singer Sargent visited in the summer of 1877 with a few fellow art students, sketching the locals and the wide mirror-like flats left behind by the retreating sea. Look at the puddles in the foreground, where the figures reappear upside down in streaks of blue and ochre.

Sargent was only twenty-two when he finished this, and he painted it to be noticed. It was his ambitious entry for the Paris Salon of 1878, his real public debut, and it won him an honorable mention. Trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran, he was working in the realist tradition of everyday labor but already borrowing the loose brushwork and outdoor light of the Impressionists, who were exhibiting nearby. A tiny lighthouse and cliff anchor the right side, and the cloud-filled sky takes up more than half the canvas. Sargent liked the subject enough to paint a second, smaller version, now in Boston, which tells you he thought he was onto something with these oyster gatherers.