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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.”

John Singer Sargent

En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 85

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 78.7 × 122.9 cm (31 × 48 3/8 in.)

framed: 117.16 × 161.77 × 13.97 cm (46 1/8 × 63 11/16 × 5 1/2 in.)

Credit Line

Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund)

Accession Number

2014.79.32

Artists / Makers

John Singer Sargent (painter) American, 1856 - 1925

Image Use

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Overview

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 Arts, Boston, 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.

Inscription

lower right: JOHN S. SARGENT. / PARIS 1878

Provenance

Admiral Augustus Ludlow Case to Daniel Rogers Case, 1893; 1917 to The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.

Associated Names

Chase, Daniel R.
Corcoran Gallery of Art

Exhibition History

1878: Salon de 1878: 95e Exposition Officielle, Palais des Champs Elysées, Paris, 1878, no. 2008.

1903: The Thirteenth Annual Exhibition of the Society of Washington Artists, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1903, unnumbered catalogue.

1925: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the Late John Singer Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1925, no. 14, as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1936: The main Currents in the Development of American Painting, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1936, no. 88, as The Oyster Gatherers.

1952: Sea and Shore, Norton Gallery and School of Art, West Palm Beach, 1952, no catalogue.

1954: Sargent, Whistler and Mary Cassatt, Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1954, no. 40, as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1959: Loan Exhibition. Masterpieces of the Corcoran Gallery of Art: A Benefit Exhibition in Honor of the Gallery's Centenary, Wildenstein, New York, 1959, unnumbered catalogue, repro., as The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1964: The Private World of John Singer Sargent, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Cleveland Museum of Art; Worcester Art Museum; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, 1964-1965, no 4, as The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1966: Past and Present: 250 Years of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1966, unpublished checklist.

1968: From El Greco to Pollock: Eaerly and Late Works by European and American Artists, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1968, no. 83, as The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1976: Corcoran [The American Genius]. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1976, unnumbered catalogue.

1982: Americans in Britanny and Normandy, 1860-1910, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; Phoenix Art Museum, National Museum of American Art, Washington, 1982-1983, no. 12, as The Oyster Gatherers at Cancale.

1986: John Singer Sargent, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, 1986-1987, unnumbered catalogue, as The Oyster Gatherers at Cancale.

1992: Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865-1915, Musée Américain, Giverny, 1992, no. 56, as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1997: Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 1997, no 3, as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

1998: John Singer Sargent, Tate Britain, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998-1999, no. 2.

1998: John Singer Sargent, Tate Gallery, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1998-1999, no. 2, as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

2003: The Impressionist Tradition in America, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 2003-2004, unpublished checklist, as The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale (En route pour la pêche).

2005: Encouraging American Genius: Master Paintings from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, 2005-2007, checklist no. 43 (shown in Washington only).

2007: Impressionists by the Sea, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Phillips Collection, Washington; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford, 2007-2008, no. 46, as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale.

2008: The American Evolution: A History through Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 2008, unpublished checklist.

2009: Sargent and the Sea, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2009-2010, unnumbered catalogue.

2013: American Journeys: Visions of Place, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 21 September 2013-28 September 2014, unpublished checklist.

Bibliography

1947: Corcoran Gallery of Art. Handbook of the American Paintings in the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Washington, 1947: 62.

1959: Corcoran Gallery of Art. Masterpieces of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Washington, 1959: 59, repro.

1998: Kilmurray, Elaine, and Richard Ormond, eds. John Singer Sargent. Exh. cat. Tate Britain, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Princeton, 1998; Washington, 1999: no. 2, repro.

1998: Ormond, Richard, and Elaine Kilmurray. John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874-1882. The Complete Paintings, Volume IV. New Haven and London, 2006: no. 670, repro.

2011: Cash, Sarah. "John Singer Sargent, En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish). In Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Edited by Sarah Cash. Washington, 2011: 31-32, 36, 37, 142-143, 268, repro.