Fishermen, Whalers and Working Boats
Winslow Homer’s dory in The Fog Warning, far from her schooner. The catboat of Breezing Up. The whalers of New Bedford, the boats of Skagen and the luggers of Newlyn. The boats people earned their living in, painted with the respect they deserve.
This chapter of Ships in Paintings holds 81 works. For each one you will find the artist and, wherever the records allow, the date and where the original is kept; then what the ship brings to the picture, and the real ship behind it when there is one. See all 1,331 works on one page.
Marea can build any of these ships as a scale model, with the maximum detail the scale permits, finished to be inspected. We can build her as the artist saw her: the same rig, the same sails set, the same colours. It isn’t a copy of a painting. It’s the ship, stepping out of it.
This database was put together by Ai Refloat™, Marea’s own artificial intelligence, from the records of museums, maritime archives and published sources. Ai Refloat is still young & like any teenager, it can be a little volatile and unpredictable at times, but above all, it is learning fast. So this list may well contain mistakes and we welcome the input of everyone who knows these paintings, photographs and ships better than we do: listening, correcting and learning is one of the many ways we work towards perfection in this craft.
When no free image of a work exists, we show instead the museum or the place where the original can be seen.
Have you spotted a mistake? Tell us which painting, photograph or ship, and we will amend it accordingly. Tell us here
The works
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Village cattle ferry Unnamed
The Cattle Ferry (Het ponteveer), 1622
Artist Esaias van de Velde (1587 to 1630)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-1293)
Medium Oil on panel
A ferry laden with people and animals crosses a river that runs through a village, houses and figures on both banks and a church and a windmill in the distance. The Rijksmuseum calls it a milestone: never before had a Dutch painter shown his native flat, watery landscape in so monumental a format. Dusk is falling and the glistening river draws the eye into the distance past countless little figures. The ferry, the everyday link across the water, sits at the heart of a new way of seeing the Dutch countryside.
“never before had a Dutch painter depicted his native flat, watery landscape in such a monumental format”
The vessels A village river ferry carrying people and livestock across the water.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Esaias van de Velde, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Dutch Greenland whalers at Smeerenburg Unnamed
The Whale-oil Refinery near the Village of Smerenburg, 1639
Artist Cornelis de Man (1621 to 1706)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-2355)
Medium Oil on canvas
Smeerenburg on Spitsbergen was a settlement of Dutch whalers, and de Man, who never went there, painted it in 1639 by combining images and stories he knew. The mountain on the left is probably the Beerenberg on Jan Mayen, and beside it rise the masts of the whaling ships. On the beach, strips of blubber are boiled down to train oil in the numerous try pots, a whale carcass is flensed on the left, and the men's barracks stand behind. The ships are the reason the whole smoking camp exists at the edge of the ice.
“As the painter never went there, he combined familiar images and stories in this work.”
The vessels Dutch Arctic whaling ships of the Noordse Compagnie era; at settlements such as Smeerenburg blubber was boiled into train oil on the beach while the ships lay offshore.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Cornelis de Man, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Herring busses Unnamed
Sign Painted on Both Sides with Herring Busses (D'Haringbuys), 1700 to 1799
Artist Anonymous, Northern Netherlands
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-C-1582)
Medium Oil on copper
Not a gallery painting but a hanging sign, painted on copper on both sides with two herring busses fishing at sea and lettered D'Haringbuys, the herring buss. That a sign could simply show this ship tells us how familiar she was: the Great Fishery, as the Dutch called the herring fishery, was especially profitable, and busses could follow the shoals far from the coast. The sign is a portrait of the working ship made for passers-by rather than connoisseurs, and all the more telling for it.
The vessels The herring buss was a seagoing Dutch fishing vessel of about 20 metres and 60 to 100 tons, round-bowed with a high stern and two or three masts, the main and fore masts lowered while fishing; gibbing and salting the herring on board let busses follow the shoals far from the coast. The first was probably built at Hoorn around 1415 and the last at Vlaardingen in 1841.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Gondolas on the Grand Canal Unnamed
The Stonemason's Yard (Campo San Vidal and Santa Maria della Carità), mid- to late 1720s
Artist Canaletto (1697 to 1768)
Where to see it National Gallery, London
Medium Oil on canvas
Canaletto's most intimate view of Venice looks across a temporary stonemason's yard in the Campo San Vidal to the church of Santa Maria della Carità, probably early in the morning. A cock crows on a windowsill, laundry hangs from the windows, a woman spins on her balcony and a child falls over in the foreground as a woman lunges to catch him. On the Grand Canal a gondola with a canopied cabin passes while others lie moored on both banks: the boats are the traffic of an ordinary working day, not a festival. It is considered one of Canaletto's finest works.
The vessels Venetian gondolas: one with a canopied cabin crossing the Grand Canal, others moored on either bank.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Canaletto; photo Sailko, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Tuna fishing boats at the madrague of Bandol Unnamed
The Madrague, or Tuna Fishing, in the Bay of Bandol (La Madrague ou la Pêche du thon), 1755
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it Musée du Louvre, Paris (INV 8295), on deposit at the Musée national de la Marine, Paris
Medium Oil on canvas
The third of the Views of the Ports of France that Louis XV commissioned from Vernet, whose brief asked for the local industry in the foreground, and at Bandol that industry was tuna. Early morning light falls on the madrague, the traditional tuna trap, as the fishing boats encircle the net being hauled up and men walk on it to stop the fish escaping. Pleasure boats watch from the left, and beyond the bay is calm, a three-master at anchor beside a tartane. Vernet spent a fortnight at Bandol in 1754 before joining his family at Toulon, and showed the picture at the Salon of 1755.
The vessels The madrague was a traditional collective tuna fishery of the Provençal coast, in which fishing boats encircled the net as it was raised. The three-master and the tartane in the distance are unnamed.
Sources Louvre · Wikipedia (FR) · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Venetian gondola with felze Unnamed
The Departure of the Gondola, mid-1760s
Artist Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727 to 1804)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019.141.20)
Medium Oil on canvas
The younger Tiepolo painted idealised scenes of contemporary Venetian life like this one. A couple in Carnival dress, masked and veiled, prepare to board a gondola; it is February, when small cabins called felzi were fitted to gondolas for warmth. The two men in blue and white livery, the Met points out, attest to Venice's large population of enslaved and freed people of colour, many of whom belonged to the gondoliers' guild. The gondola here is not a postcard: it is a winter taxi, a social stage and a workplace with its own guild.
“in February, when small cabins (felzi) were installed on gondolas for warmth.”
The vessels Gondolas were the passenger boats of Venice, rowed standing by gondoliers who belonged to a guild; in winter a small cabin, the felze, was fitted for the passengers' warmth.
Sources The Met
Image: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Dieppe fishing boats in the outer harbour Unnamed
View of the Port of Dieppe (Vue du port de Dieppe), 1765
Artist Joseph Vernet (1714 to 1789)
Where to see it Musée national de la Marine, Paris (on deposit from the Musée du Louvre)
Medium Oil on canvas
This is the last of the fifteen Ports of France painted by Vernet for Louis XV, a series meant to glorify the kingdom's harbours, each with its local activity in the foreground. Vernet went to Dieppe in September and October 1763 to make studies from nature. The view is taken in the morning across the outer harbour from the quay of the Arcades de la Bourse, the Pollet opposite. At Dieppe the chosen trade was fishing: every kind of fish caught off that coast laid out in the foreground, fishermen mending their nets, fishwives selling. The boats and their catch are the wealth of the port.
The vessels The boats are unnamed fishing craft and merchant vessels moored in Dieppe's outer harbour; the commission asked Vernet to show each port's own activity, and at Dieppe that was fishing.
Sources Wikipedia (FR) · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Zaandam Named ship
The Greenlandman Zaandam of the Shipping Company Claes Taan and Son on a Whale Hunt, 1772
Artist Joghem de Vries
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-4065)
Medium Oil on canvas
A Zaandam painter records a Zaandam ship: the whaler Zaandam of Claes Taan and Son among the ice floes of the Davis Strait in 1772. The Rijksmuseum notes that she was one of 38 Dutch whalers there that year and came home with 240 barrels of blubber from five whales, while the whole fleet killed 240 whales. In the foreground her men have just harpooned a whale from their rowing boats; to the left lies a three-master under the Danish flag, and two Inuit paddle a kayak. It is a ship portrait and a season's record in paint.
“And in the foreground, the men of the ‘Zaandam’ have just harpooned a whale.”
The real ship Zaandam was a whaler owned by Claes Taan and Son of the Zaan district, which sent many ships to the Arctic; in 1772 she sailed to the Davis Strait, between Greenland and the North American coast, and returned with 240 barrels of blubber.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Joghem de Vries, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Prison hulks in Portsmouth Harbour Unnamed
Prison Hulks in Portsmouth Harbour, c. 1810
Artist Ambroise-Louis Garneray (1783 to 1857)
Where to see it Hampshire County Council (FA1996.24)
Medium Oil on canvas
Garneray painted this from experience. A sailor who had served under the corsair Surcouf, he was wounded and taken when the frigate Belle Poule was captured in March 1806, and spent the next eight years in the prison hulks off Portsmouth: the Protée, Couronne, Vengeance and Assistance. He improved his lot by painting and selling pictures to a local merchant. Here the hulks lie in a long line on still water under a vast pale sky, cut down and roofed over, small boats moving between them: a prisoner's view of the floating prisons that held him.
“But for piracy, I believe that I practiced about all kinds of navigation”
The vessels Prison hulks were old warships used as floating prisons; Garneray was held in the Protée, Couronne, Vengeance and Assistance off Portsmouth until his release on 18 May 1814.
Image: Ambroise-Louis Garneray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Stour barge under construction Unnamed
Boat-Building near Flatford Mill, 1815
Artist John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (FA.37[O])
Medium Oil on canvas
On a still summer day by the Stour, a barge takes shape in the dry dock of the boatyard owned by Constable's father at Flatford. It was being built, the V&A explains, to carry the family's flour down to Mistley in Essex on its way to London. Constable painted the landscape entirely in the open air from a tiny sketchbook drawing, and his biographer C. R. Leslie praised its atmospheric truth. The unfinished hull, drawn with unusual precision, is the working heart of Constable Country: the boat that tied the mill to the city.
“the tremulous vibration of the heated air near the ground seems visible”
The vessels A barge under construction in the boatyard of Constable's father by Flatford Mill, built to carry his flour down the Stour to Mistley in Essex on its way to London.
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Stour barges at Flatford Unnamed
Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River), 1816 to 1817
Artist John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Where to see it Tate Britain, London
Medium Oil on canvas
The subtitle says what Constable wanted us to see: a scene on a navigable river. Barges lie on the Stour below Flatford Mill while a boy sits on the tow horse on the towpath and a man stoops to the tow rope. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1817, it is seen as a forerunner of the six-footers that made his name. The barges were the reason the river mattered: a barge built in his father's boatyard by the mill carried his father's flour down to Mistley, and Constable paints them as part of the landscape itself.
The vessels Stour barges carried flour from the mills downriver towards London; the V&A notes that a barge Constable painted being built in his father's boatyard by Flatford Mill was meant to carry his flour down to Mistley in Essex on its way to London.
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Stour barge carrying a tow horse Unnamed
The White Horse, 1819
Artist John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Where to see it The Frick Collection, New York
Medium Oil on canvas
Just below the lock at Flatford, where the towpath switches from one bank of the Stour to the other, a barge ferries its tow horse across the river. Constable painted this small incident of river life on a canvas six feet wide, a size then reserved for historical, religious or mythological subjects, and it was the first of his six-footers, the series that includes The Hay Wain. At the Royal Academy in 1819 it drew more attention than anything he had shown before, and critics compared him with Turner for the first time. The working barge made the ordinary monumental.
“For the first time, an artist was using extra-ordinary proportions for the most ordinary of English scenes”
The vessels Barges on the Stour were towed by horses along a towpath; where the path changed banks below Flatford lock, the tow horse was ferried across the river.
Sources Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Stour barge and its tow horse Unnamed
The Leaping Horse, 1825
Artist John Constable (1776 to 1837)
Where to see it Royal Academy of Arts, London
Medium Oil on canvas
On the Stour in Constable Country a tow horse hauling a barge leaps one of the barriers put up to stop cattle wandering, its rider on its back. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1825 under the plain title Landscape, it is one of the great six-footers, and a full-sized study for it survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The moment is all energy, horse and barge in sudden motion under a windy sky, the everyday traffic of the river turned into drama.
The vessels Stour barges were towed by horses along the river bank, which was crossed by barriers built to stop cattle wandering.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Print
Amelia Wilson and Castor Named ship
South Sea Whale Fishery (the ships Amelia Wilson and Castor off the Island of Buru), 1825
Artist After William John Huggins (1781 to 1845), aquatint by Thomas Sutherland
Where to see it Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington
Medium Coloured aquatint
Huggins was a London painter of ship portraits whose work, both original and as prints, found a ready market among merchants and seamen. In this aquatint, engraved by Thomas Sutherland and published in 1825, the Amelia Wilson and the Castor lie off the island of Buru while their boats attack sperm whales in the foreground, one boat destroyed by a wounded whale. The Amelia Wilson was a real ship with a restless life: a French prize taken in 1809, a West Indiaman, then a whaler making long voyages to Timor and the seas off Japan.
The real ship Amelia Wilson was built in France, captured in 1809 and renamed by her new owners, Wilson and Co. She traded to the West Indies, then made five whaling voyages from 1818, mostly to Timor and the seas off Japan, and was wrecked in the Bonin Islands in 1833 with the loss of some 1,440 barrels of oil; her crew were saved.
Sources natlib.govt.nz · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: After William John Huggins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Print
Harmony of Hull Named ship
The Northern Whale Fishery (the Harmony of Hull and other whalers in the ice), 1829
Artist After William John Huggins (1781 to 1845), aquatint by Edward Duncan (1803 to 1882)
Medium Hand-coloured aquatint
Huggins first painted this scene in 1828, and his son-in-law Edward Duncan engraved it in 1829 as this hand-coloured aquatint. The Hull whaler Harmony, an American-built barque of 292 tons, lies at the centre among ice-bound ships in the Davis Strait, with the Margaret of London and the Eliza Swan of Montrose beside her. Men with lances work on the ice, boats thread the floes, and a May Day garland is hoisted halfway up the Harmony's main topgallant stay, a note of celebration in a landscape of ice. A larger second version was painted in 1835, most likely for the son of the Harmony's owner.
The real ship Harmony was an American-built barque of 292 tons, owned by Thomas Bell and sailing from Hull in the northern whale fishery to the Davis Strait.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: After William John Huggins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Whaleboat and whaleship Unnamed
Attacking the Right Whale, c. 1835
Artist Ambroise-Louis Garneray (1783 to 1857)
Where to see it Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
Medium Oil on canvas
Garneray went to sea at thirteen, served under the corsair Surcouf and spent eight years in British prison hulks before returning to painting, and in the 1830s he took up aquatint and engraving on a large scale. Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick, called two French engravings after Garnery's paintings, attacks on the sperm and the right whale, the finest pictures of whaling to be found anywhere. In this canvas a crowded whaleboat surges alongside a right whale spouting red, a harpooner poised in the bow, while behind them the whaleships go on with their work, one trailing dark smoke. The small boat against the huge animal is the terror and business of whaling in one frame.
“by far the finest, though in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to be anywhere found”
The vessels Whaleboats were lowered from the whaleship when whales were sighted; here one attacks a right whale while the ships lie behind.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia · gutenberg.org
Image: Ambroise-Louis Garneray, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Fur traders' canoe Unnamed
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, 1845
Artist George Caleb Bingham (1811 to 1879)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (33.61)
Medium Oil on canvas
An old trader in a pointed cap paddles a laden canoe down the Missouri in hazy light, a younger man leaning on the cargo, a black animal chained at the bow, their reflections doubled in the glassy water. Bingham first called the picture French Trader, Half-breed Son; the American Art Union thought the title controversial and renamed it when it was first exhibited, and the engraving it distributed helped make his name. The Met notes that he painted it after returning to St. Louis with sketches from central Missouri, and that the luminous scene idealised frontier life for an Eastern audience.
The vessels A fur traders' canoe on the Missouri, carrying two men and their cargo downstream.
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Pinky and New England boat at their moorings, with a yawl boat and wherry on the beach Unnamed
The Fort and Ten Pound Island, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1847
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (635, 1982.43)
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted the year before Lane moved back to Gloucester, this late-afternoon view looks from Duncan's Point across to Fort Point and Ten Pound Island, with Fort Defiance on the summit and the fish flakes of the drying yard beyond. The beach is full of life: six men strain to push a yawl boat into the water, a wherry waits at the water's edge, a boy watches a man fishing from the rocks, and a fisherman dresses cod while a smartly dressed Boston dandy points his walking stick at the catch. The Lane catalogue wonders whether the dandy is Lane himself.
“Can this dandified Bostonian be one F. H. Lane who, in the year after he painted this picture, moved back to Gloucester?”
The vessels Afloat in Harbor Cove are a square-sterned New England boat, descended from the colonial shallop, and a double-ended pinky; the wherry differed from a dory in having a slightly wider stern. Two fishing schooners lie grounded on the causeway in the background.
Sources fitzhenrylaneonline.org · Wikipedia
Image: Fitz Henry Lane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Hardanger wedding boats Unnamed
Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord (Brudeferd i Hardanger), 1848
Artist Adolph Tidemand (1814 to 1876) and Hans Gude (1825 to 1903)
Where to see it National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (formerly the National Gallery)
Medium Oil on canvas
A wedding party crosses the fjord in rowing boats after the ceremony. In the first boat the groom tips his hat beside the bride in her crown and red Hardanger costume; a guest pours a drink, a fiddler plays and a man stands to fire a gun. Gude, only 23, painted the landscape and Tidemand the people, in Düsseldorf in the winter of 1847 to 1848. Commissioned as the backdrop for a tableau vivant in Christiania, it became one of the best-known Norwegian paintings, the boats carrying the whole romance of national life across the water.
The vessels Open rowing boats of the Hardanger fjord, shown carrying the bridal party and its guests from the church; the crew wear bunad costume and two more boats follow in the distance. No individual boat is identified.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Adolph Tidemand, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
New Bedford whaleships Unnamed
Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World, 1848
Artist Benjamin Russell (1804 to 1885) and Caleb Purrington
Where to see it New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts
Medium Paint on cloth (moving panorama)
At 1,275 feet this is the longest painting in the United States, longer than the Empire State Building is tall. Benjamin Russell had worked as a cooper aboard a whaling ship before he took up painting, and with the sign painter Caleb Purrington he turned a voyage round the world into a show: the canvas was mounted on spools on a stage and cranked along, with narration, music and lighting effects. It was first displayed in 1848. Russell's ships are drawn almost perfectly to scale, like shipwright's control drawings, which is why his views were valued above all for their accuracy.
“surprising in its variety and beauty”
The vessels The panorama depicts a whaling voyage around the world in the first half of the nineteenth century; its ships were drawn by a painter who had served as a cooper aboard a whaler.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Benjamin Russell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Essex Named ship
The Wreck of the Essex (detail of the Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage 'Round the World), 1848
Artist Benjamin Russell (1804 to 1885) and Caleb Purrington
Where to see it New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts
Medium Paint on cloth (moving panorama)
Among the scenes of Russell and Purrington's panorama is the most famous disaster in whaling: the Essex of Nantucket, struck and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific on 20 November 1820. Her twenty men took to three whaleboats some 2,000 nautical miles from South America; three months later only a few were still alive, and the accounts of the first mate Owen Chase and the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson made the story known. The tragedy inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. In the painted scene the ship still sails, a whale surging in white water at her bow, her boat pulling nearby.
The real ship Essex was a Nantucket whaleship launched in 1799, considered lucky after six profitable voyages. On 20 November 1820, under Captain George Pollard Jr., she was struck and sunk by a sperm whale about 2,000 nautical miles from South America; her twenty men took to three whaleboats, and only a few survived.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Benjamin Russell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Lumber brig (half brig) grounded at low tide, with a log raft and yawl boat Unnamed
Twilight on the Kennebec, 1849
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it Peabody Essex Museum, Salem (M22672)
Medium Oil on canvas
One of Lane's earliest Maine pictures, set on the tidal lower Kennebec near the narrows called The Chops. The tide has ebbed and a lumber brig lies aground, her sails hung loosely in the gear so the cool night air and the morning dew will not leave them mildewed. On the bank a log raft waits with the brig's yawl boat beside it; when the tide rises it will be loaded with boards and floated out to her. A northbound steamer passes through the rough water at the right. It is a working scene turned into a twilight meditation.
The vessels Half brigs, also called lumber brigs, loaded long sawn boards through a port in the bow because they would not pass through the deck hatch; once the hold was full, more lumber was stowed on deck from rail to rail.
Sources fitzhenrylaneonline.org · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Fitz Henry Lane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Durham boat carrying Washington Unnamed
Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851
Artist Emanuel Leutze (1816 to 1868)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (97.34)
Medium Oil on canvas
Leutze conceived this picture of Washington's crossing of the Delaware on 25 to 26 December 1776 during the Revolutions of 1848, hoping to encourage Europe's liberal reformers; painted in Düsseldorf, its river is modelled on the Rhine. More than 50,000 people came to see this second version in New York in 1851. The boat carries a cross-section of the colonies: a man in a Scottish bonnet, a man of African descent, a western rifleman at the bow. The real crossing used Durham boats, larger flat-bottomed freight boats, and the historian David Hackett Fischer has argued that the men would have stood to keep out of the icy water.
The vessels Durham boats were large, flat-bottomed, double-ended freight boats with high sides and a beam of about eight feet, used to haul freight on the Delaware; Washington's army used them to cross the river on 25 and 26 December 1776.
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Leksand church boats Unnamed
Church Goers Arriving by Boat at the Parish Church of Leksand on Siljan Lake, 1853
Artist Wilhelm Marstrand (1810 to 1873)
Where to see it Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS618)
Medium Oil on canvas
War kept Marstrand from a honeymoon in the south in 1850, so on Hans Christian Andersen's advice he went to Dalarna, where on Sundays the people of Leksand crossed Lake Siljan to church in their great church boats. He returned in July 1851 to sketch, and the finished canvas was ready for the opening of the Charlottenborg exhibition in 1853. Jesper Svenningsen writes that Marstrand gave up anecdote and caricature here, orchestrating the crowd with a tautness more like a battle scene than an ordinary Sunday morning. The long boats, packed with parishioners, carry a whole community.
“more reminiscent of a battle scene than of a rural population assembling on a perfectly ordinary Sunday morning”
The vessels Great church boats (kyrkbåtar) in which the people of Leksand crossed Lake Siljan to Sunday service, as the painting's Danish title records.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Wilhelm Marstrand, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Small sailing boat running for shelter on Narragansett Bay Unnamed
Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859
Artist Martin Johnson Heade (1819 to 1904)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.160)
Medium Oil on canvas
A man and his dog sit on the shore of Narragansett Bay, sunlight at their backs, watching black clouds and a thin bolt of lightning over water gone dark as slate. Heade caught what a critic of his day called the ominous hush before a storm, working from a sketch of an approaching storm he saw from Prudence Island around 1858. Out on the bay a small white sail stands bright against the dark, with a rowing boat nearer the shore. It is one of the earliest of Heade's small series of coastal storm pictures.
“ominous hush”
The vessels An unnamed small sailing boat and a rowing boat on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island; the Met does not describe them.
Sources The Met
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Outward-bound whaling ship and a schooner off Gay Head Unnamed
Whaler off the Vineyard: Outward Bound, 1859
Artist William Bradford (1823 to 1892)
Where to see it Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington (1978.72)
Medium Oil on fibreboard
Bradford is best known for his Arctic pictures, but his early work was given to the ships of New England; he grew up near New Bedford, home of a successful whaling industry. Here a large whaler sails past the cliffs of Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard, the standard route for whalers entering and leaving New Bedford, while a smaller schooner sails in the foreground. The Smithsonian points to his attention to the smallest details, from the ripples in the sails to the suspenders on the sailors: the eye of a ship portraitist turned on the start of a voyage.
“Bradford emphasized the smallest details in this sweeping seascape, from the ripples in the sails to the suspenders on the sailors.”
The vessels New Bedford was home to a successful whaling industry, and whalers leaving the port passed Gay Head on Martha's Vineyard on their way to sea.
Sources Smithsonian American Art Museum · Wikipedia
Image: William Bradford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Lumber schooner, pinky and lobsterman's dory becalmed off Halfway Rock Unnamed
Becalmed off Halfway Rock, 1860
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington (1992.51.8)
Medium Oil on canvas
Halfway Rock, a dome of stone halfway between Boston and Cape Ann, was a marker for coasters and fishermen alike, and Lane gathers them round it in a late-afternoon calm. A lumber schooner heading south, probably with Maine boards for Boston, is silhouetted against the sun, a lobsterman works from his dory, and a pinky towing a dory and wherry is fitted out for gillnetting herring, which schooled here in September. Behind the pinky a lone square-rigged merchant ship stands for the decline of Salem's foreign trade. It is a portrait of a whole coastal economy held in stillness.
The vessels Lumber schooners, or coasters, carried boards cut in Maine south to Boston; the pinky is fitted out for gillnetting herring. The stone monument on Halfway Rock was probably erected by the US Coast Survey around 1840 for triangulation.
Sources fitzhenrylaneonline.org · National Gallery of Art
Image: Fitz Henry Lane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Scheveningen bomschuiten Unnamed
Bluff-Bowed Scheveningen Boats at Anchor (Scheveningse bommen voor anker), 1860 to 1889
Artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831 to 1915)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-2474)
Medium Oil on canvas
Four fishing boats lie at anchor in the shallows off Scheveningen with a group of fishwives standing by them, in an upright canvas that gives the hulls and masts their full height. Mesdag, the Hague School's great painter of the North Sea, returned to these boats again and again. They had no harbour: they sailed from the beach and came back to it, their heavy flat bottoms built to run through the surf and take the ground. The painting is a portrait of the boats as the village knew them, waiting in the shallow water by the shore.
The vessels The bomschuit, a flat-bottomed, decked boat derived from the pink, served the harbourless fishing villages of the Holland coast; the larger ones carried two masts, with leeboards to reduce drift.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia (NL)
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Coastal vessels and a boatman's small boat off Owl's Head Unnamed
Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (48.448)
Medium Oil on canvas
Probably Lane's best-known work, painted in the manner later called Luminism for its pervasive light. He greatly simplified the idyllic harbour view: a single boatman gazes across a seemingly unpopulated bay, while the headland of Owl's Head and its tiny lighthouse stand silhouetted against the evening sky. The commercial traffic of the coast is there, but pared back so that nothing distracts from the stillness, though in the 1850s a mariner could write of five hundred sail passing Owl's Head in one day. Here the vessels give scale and a trace of human business to a picture about light and the end of a day.
“nature is a presence that envelops and transfixes the solitary boatman”
The vessels Unnamed coastal craft of West Penobscot Bay; the Lane catalogue indexes a half brig, a schooner and a small yawl boat or dory in the picture. Owl's Head Light guided mariners into the port of Rockland.
Sources fitzhenrylaneonline.org · MFA Boston · Wikipedia
Image: Fitz Henry Lane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Becalmed schooner and full-rigged ship, schooner boat and a beached New England boat Unnamed
Stage Fort across Gloucester Harbor, 1862
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1978.203)
Medium Oil on canvas
One of Lane's largest canvases, and very likely the picture he made for his doctor and friend H. E. Davidson, shows the overgrown Stage Fort, a relic of seventeenth-century Gloucester, across a still harbour in the light of a late-summer afternoon. A schooner and a full-rigged ship lie becalmed in the distance while a small schooner boat approaches the shore. On the beach lies the time-worn hull of a New England boat, a type Lane painted for nearly two decades, each time in a further stage of decay. The Met finds the mood both hopeful and elegiac.
“The light is unearthly, and the slack sails reveal the utter stillness of the air and water.”
The vessels The beached hull is a New England boat, a Cape Ann type; the Lane catalogue traces the same wreck to the broken frames on the beach at Norman's Woe Cove in another painting of 1862.
Sources The Met · fitzhenrylaneonline.org
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Two lumber schooners at evening Unnamed
Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1863
Artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804 to 1865)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington (1980.29.1)
Medium Oil on canvas
Two motionless ships guide the eye across still water towards the embers of the dying sun. In the foreground sailors lower the sails of a schooner heavily loaded with lumber to moor her for the night; a second schooner lies in the distance with her sails already down. Painted only two years before Lane's death, which was preceded by severe ill health, the picture reduces a working scene to its essence, and its emptiness, in Tim Barringer's words, lends it a melancholy overtone. The four tiny sailors are dwarfed by sea and sky at the close of a day's labour.
“documentary qualities have become secondary to poetic ones.”
The vessels Lumber schooners carried timber from the Penobscot River, one of the main routes into the wooded interior of Maine, out to the Atlantic coast and south to Boston; Maine white pine and spruce were in demand for shipbuilding and for the growing north-eastern cities.
Sources fitzhenrylaneonline.org · National Gallery of Art
Image: Fitz Henry Lane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
A Sogn jakt (sognejakt) Unnamed
A Sloop from Sogn (En sognejakt), 1866
Artist Hans Gude (1825 to 1903)
Where to see it Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (NG.M.00635-003)
Medium Oil on canvas mounted on board
Gude dated this study to the day, 29 August 1866, at Fresvik on the Sognefjord. A broad jakt with a green-painted square stern and small stern windows lies moored beside stacked timber and a wooden shed, her mast tall against the steep mountainside, figures working aboard. It is a portrait of a working vessel rather than a romantic view: the museum catalogues it as a boat study, and it came to the National Gallery by Gude's own bequest in 1904. It belongs to the years when he was turning from inland landscapes to the coast and the sea.
The vessels The jakt was a broad, small, fast-sailing flat-sterned cargo vessel with one mast and gaff rig, probably of Dutch origin, built mainly for fjord and coastal freight; related Hardanger jakts carried salt fish from northern Norway to the west coast.
Sources Nasjonalmuseet · Wikipedia (NO)
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Volga cargo barge Unnamed
Barge Haulers on the Volga (Burlaki na Volge), 1870 to 1873
Artist Ilya Repin (1844 to 1930)
Where to see it State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
Medium Oil on canvas
Eleven burlaki, bound in leather harnesses, drag a barge along the bank of the Volga in a white, silvery light. Repin saw such men while holidaying on the river in 1870 and painted real people among them: a former soldier, a painter, and the defrocked priest Kanin who leads the line, a man of dignity whom Repin likened to a saint. The barge sits behind them with the Russian flag flying upside down from its mast, and far off a tiny steamer suggests that such labour is no longer needed. The picture launched Repin's career and has been called perhaps the most famous painting of the Peredvizhniki.
“They are like a group of forest Hercules with their disheveled heads, their sun-tanned chests”
The vessels A cargo barge on the Volga, which had to be hauled upstream against the current by gangs of burlaki walking the bank; the small steamboat in the distance hints at the machines that would replace them.
Sources Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Josie Named ship
Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (The Champion Single Sculls), 1871
Artist Thomas Eakins (1844 to 1916)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (34.92)
Medium Oil on canvas
Eakins had just come home from Paris when his friend Max Schmitt won the Schuylkill single sculls championship on 5 October 1870 in record time. The painting reproduces the weather and the position of the sun at the date and hour of the win, but shows Schmitt nearly at rest, dragging his oars, just downstream of the Columbia Railroad Bridge where the race turned. His scull was named Josie after his sister, and Eakins painted himself rowing in the middle distance, signing his name on the stern of his own boat. It was the first of almost thirty rowing works.
“a shock to the artistic conventionalities of the city”
The real ship Josie was Max Schmitt's own single scull, named after his sister; Schmitt, an early convert to sculls, rowed for the Pennsylvania Barge Club.
Fishermen and working boats · Print
The American Arctic whaling fleet of 1871 Unnamed
Abandonment of the Whalers in the Arctic Ocean, September 1871, 1872
Artist After John Perry Newell (1831 to 1898), printed by Benjamin Russell, New Bedford
Where to see it The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino
Medium Hand-coloured lithograph
In September 1871 thirty-three American whaleships hunting bowheads off northern Alaska were pinned against the shore by the ice. On 12 September the captains signed a compact aboard the Florida, and on the morning of 14 September each ship struck her flag and the 1,219 people aboard set off in small whaleboats on a two-day journey of seventy miles over ice and sea to the seven ships that had escaped to the south. This print, published through the New Bedford artist Benjamin Russell, shows the fleet caught in the ice with Wainwright Inlet behind, a serious blow to an industry already in decline.
“we feel ourselves under the painful necessity of abandoning our vessels”
The vessels The fleet of 33 ships, 22 of them from New Bedford, was lost to the ice near Point Belcher in September 1871; salvors later recovered the Minerva and the Seneca. The rescuing ships included the Europa, Arctic, Progress and Lagoda.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: After John Perry Newell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Toy sailing boat Unnamed
Children of the Sea (Kinderen der zee), 1872
Artist Jozef Israëls (1824 to 1911)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-2382)
Medium Oil on canvas
Four children of a fishing family play with a toy sailing boat in the shallows, the eldest boy carrying a smaller child on his back. The Rijksmuseum reads the charming scene as a message: in their rags and paltry toys we glimpse their future, and the little boat stands for the rigours of life at sea. Israëls first painted the subject in 1863 and it was so popular that he repeated it often. A toy boat has rarely carried so much weight.
“the little boat stands for the rigours of life at sea”
The vessels A child's toy sailing boat, which the Rijksmuseum reads as a sign of the rigours of life at sea awaiting a fisherman's children.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
The Biglin brothers' pair-oared racing shell Unnamed
The Biglin Brothers Turning the Stake, 1873
Artist Thomas Eakins (1844 to 1916)
Where to see it Cleveland Museum of Art (1927.1984)
Medium Oil on canvas
In 1872 John and Barney Biglin, brothers from New York active in professional rowing, challenged any English pair to a race; none came forward, but a Pittsburgh crew accepted, and in May the brothers met them on a five-mile course on the Schuylkill in Philadelphia. Eakins paints the hardest moment, the turn around the stake at halfway, spectators lining the bank and the rivals lagging behind. The Biglins won by a minute and were proclaimed world champions, and Eakins painted them many times. The Cleveland Museum sees the picture as a celebration of athletic teamwork.
“Barney and John Biglin negotiate the tricky turn around a stake marking the halfway point in the contest.”
The vessels A pair-oared racing shell rowed by two oarsmen; in the 1870s rowing was among the most popular spectator sports in the United States.
Sources Cleveland Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Toy boats and passing Gloucester craft Unnamed
The Boat Builders, 1873
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields
Medium Oil on panel
Two boys in wide-brimmed hats sit on the rocky shore at Gloucester working on toy boats while real sails pass offshore. Homer painted it in the summer of 1873, part of a series of drawings and paintings about shipbuilding in the port, and the link between the toy hulls and the working vessels on the water is the whole point: the boys' game suggests their future role in the ships, the sea and the fisheries. The picture was reproduced as an engraving in Harper's Weekly on 11 October 1873.
The vessels Toy sailing hulls, echoed by the working boats passing offshore; Homer painted it in Gloucester during his 1873 series on shipbuilding.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
The catboat Gloucester Named in the picture
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), 1873 to 1876
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington
Medium Oil on canvas
Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873 after a summer at Gloucester, and it shows a catboat called the Gloucester chopping through the harbour with a man, three boys and their catch. He worked on it for three years, painting out a fourth boy near the mast and putting an anchor, a sign of hope, in the bow while the boy at the tiller looks towards the horizon. Finished in the centennial year 1876 and shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, it became one of the best-loved images of American life. The boat carries everything: the wind in the sail, the lean of the hull, the bodies swaying with the swell.
“There is no truer or heartier work in the exhibition.”
The vessels The catboat Gloucester, a small fishing boat under a single sail, sailing through Gloucester harbour.
Sources National Gallery of Art · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Children in a dory, with Gloucester fishing schooners beyond Unnamed
Gloucester Harbor, 1873
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (F76-46)
Medium Oil on canvas
Three children take a dory out on Gloucester Harbor, one rowing and two seated in the stern, under a sky filled with pink cloud. In the 1870s Homer was known for scenes of children at play that were thought refreshingly free of sentiment. Behind the boys stand huge schooners, which the Nelson-Atkins reads as a sign of the boys' possible future livelihood, so that a summer outing carries a glimpse of the working life to come. The picture glows with an eerie mix of pink and blue light, and a distant gull gives depth to the calm.
“suggests, by the presence of the huge schooners in the background, the boys' possible future livelihood.”
The vessels The children row a dory; the huge schooners behind them are read by the museum as the boys' possible future livelihood.
Sources art.nelson-atkins.org · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Drawing
John Biglin's single scull Unnamed
John Biglin in a Single Scull, c. 1873
Artist Thomas Eakins (1844 to 1916)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (24.108)
Medium Watercolour on off-white wove paper
John Biglin, who with his brother Barney won fame as a professional oarsman in the decade after the Civil War, sits in his single scull, oars in hand. When Eakins began painting watercolours for exhibition in 1873 he took up sporting scenes, and this sheet is a replica of one he sent to his Paris teacher Gérôme for criticism. The master's reply was warm and proud. Eakins painted John and Barney again and again, eleven pictures in all, and here the needle-thin hull becomes an instrument of pure effort and balance.
“Your watercolor is entirely good and I am very pleased to have in New York a pupil such as you who does me honor.”
The vessels The boat is John Biglin's single scull, a racing boat rowed by one man with a pair of oars; John raced professionally with his brothers in the decade after the Civil War.
Fishermen and working boats · Print
Schooner on the stocks at Gloucester Unnamed
Ship-Building, Gloucester Harbor (from Harper's Weekly), 1873
Artist After Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (29.88.9(8))
Medium Wood engraving
Published in Harper's Weekly on 11 October 1873, the same issue that reproduced The Boat Builders as an engraving, this print belongs to Homer's summer series on shipbuilding at Gloucester. A big wooden hull stands on the stocks with shipwrights working along her rail and staging, timbers and planks strewn across the yard, and in the foreground boys sit among the wood chips, two of them holding toy sailing boats. It shows the fishing fleet before it floats: the timbers, the shipwrights, and the children who would one day sail in such vessels.
The vessels A large wooden vessel under construction on the stocks in a Gloucester shipyard in 1873.
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Fishing boat careened on Berck beach Unnamed
Tarring the Boat (Le Bateau goudronné), 1873
Artist Édouard Manet (1832 to 1883)
Where to see it Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (BF166)
Medium Oil on canvas
During one of his regular summer stays at Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1873, Manet painted at the beach of Berck the hull of a fishing boat being tarred. It is an unglamorous subject, upkeep rather than adventure, and he painted it with a darker palette than usual, typical of his work at that time. The black hull, propped up on the sand, fills much of the canvas; two men work against it with a burning torch, flames and smoke rising, while a pot stands on the sand and a sail shows far off on the sea. It is a rare, direct look at the care a working boat needs.
The vessels A fishing boat hauled out and propped on the beach at Berck while her hull is tarred.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Rail shooting skiffs in the Delaware marshes Unnamed
Pushing for Rail, 1874
Artist Thomas Eakins (1844 to 1916)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (16.65)
Medium Oil on canvas
Eakins hunted waterfowl with his father and friends in the tidal marshes of New Jersey's Delaware River, and in 1873 those trips produced a series of pictures. Hunting for rail, small marsh birds, was possible only at high tide, when the pusher could drive his flat-bottomed boat through the thick reeds while the gunner took aim. Three pairs of sportsmen line up across the canvas like a frieze, painted in nearly microscopic detail and showing the successive phases of the hunt: loading, steadying the boat and waiting, and taking aim. The boats, and the men standing in them, make a study in balance.
“possible only at high tide, when the ‘pusher’ can propel the flat-bottomed boat through the thick reeds”
The vessels Small flat-bottomed boats pushed through the reeds at high tide by a 'pusher', used for rail shooting in the tidal marshes of the Delaware River in New Jersey.
Sources The Met
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Racing sailboats on the Delaware River Unnamed
Sailboats Racing on the Delaware, 1874
Artist Thomas Eakins (1844 to 1916)
Where to see it Philadelphia Museum of Art (1929-184-28)
Medium Oil on canvas
Back in Philadelphia in 1870 after four years of study in Paris, Eakins chose modern American life as his subject and began his rowing, sailing and hunting pictures. Several of the sailing scenes, possibly this one, record real races he watched at Gloucester, New Jersey. The Philadelphia Museum of Art points to his dedication to getting the details right, from the precise rigging of the central sailboat to the simple but powerful suggestion of the crew straining against the wind.
The vessels The boats are small racing sailboats of the Delaware River; the Philadelphia Museum of Art notes that Eakins based several sailing scenes on races he watched at Gloucester, New Jersey.
Sources Philadelphia Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Coal barges on the Seine at Clichy Unnamed
The Coal Dockers (Les Déchargeurs de charbon), c. 1875
Artist Claude Monet (1840 to 1926)
Where to see it Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Medium Oil on canvas
Monet, then living at Argenteuil, came closer to Paris for this unusual industrial scene: barges being unloaded on the Seine near the Asnières bridge, where coal fed the steam engines of the riverside works, Gustave Eiffel's workshops among them. Silhouetted men carrying loads file along planks between the barges and the bank beneath the heavy span of the bridge. Unusually for Monet the colours seem clogged with dust, and art historians consider the influence of Hiroshige and Hokusai beyond doubt. The barges are the link between river and industry, and the men are their human conveyor belt.
The vessels Seine barges (péniches) bringing coal to the industrial bank at Clichy, near the Asnières bridge, where it fed the steam engines of the local works.
Sources Wikipedia (FR) · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Scheveningen pinks Unnamed
Fishing Pinks in Breaking Waves (Pinken in de branding), c. 1875 to 1885
Artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831 to 1915)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-2670)
Medium Oil on canvas
The Scheveningen fleet lies in the breaking waves, their wooden flat-bottomed pinks built to be pulled straight onto the beach, since the village had no harbour. Anchors stick out of the sand in the foreground. As the Rijksmuseum explains, when the boats arrived the women flocked to the beach to buy the fresh catch at auction, then went from door to door selling it from carts. Mesdag gives us a glimpse into the life of the fishermen of Scheveningen, the boats and the crowd on the sand bound together by the catch.
“Their wooden flatbottomed ships, ‘pinks,’ could easily be pulled onto the beach in the absence of a harbour.”
The vessels Pinks were the wooden, flat-bottomed fishing boats of Scheveningen, pulled up onto the beach because the village had no harbour; the catch was auctioned on the beach.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia
Image: Hendrik Willem Mesdag, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Hornbæk fishing boats landing the catch Unnamed
Morning at Hornbæk: The Fishermen Coming Ashore (Morgen ved Hornbæk. Fiskerne kommer i land), 1875
Artist Peder Severin Krøyer (1851 to 1909)
Where to see it Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen (204)
Medium Oil on canvas
Years before Skagen, the young Krøyer made his name with paintings of the fishermen of Hornbæk on the north coast of Zealand. In this large early canvas, over a metre and a half wide, the boats have just come in: their tall sails hang loose against the morning sky, men haul and carry on the beach, and women in headscarves gather round baskets of fish. The same year he painted another view of the scene, Morning at Hornbæk: Men and Women Bargaining. The boats frame the whole crowd like a stage set, the working life of the shore depending on them.
The vessels Open sailing fishing boats of Hornbæk on the north coast of Zealand, drawn up on the beach to land their catch.
Image: Peder Severin Krøyer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Rowing boat on the Yerres Unnamed
Boating Party (Partie de bateau, or Le Canotier au chapeau haut de forme), 1878
Artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848 to 1894)
Where to see it Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Medium Oil on canvas
Caillebotte had spent his summers on the Yerres since the age of twelve, and in 1876 he joined the sailing club at Argenteuil frequented by Manet, Monet and Renoir; boating would remain a lifelong passion. Here an elegant friend rows on the river, jacket off but top hat still on, as though just arrived from Paris, while two rowers approach behind in a périssoire. The picture hung at the Impressionist exhibition of 1879 and was caricatured in Le Charivari. The family property at Yerres was sold that June, ending the happy summers the painting records.
The vessels A rowing boat on the Yerres near the Caillebotte family property; behind it two rowers approach in a périssoire, a light skiff Caillebotte painted several times at the time.
Sources Wikipedia (FR) · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, where the original is kept. Photo: Gonzalezpascalphotos, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Tarred rowing boat off Haikko Unnamed
Conveying the Child's Coffin (A Child's Funeral), 1879
Artist Albert Edelfelt (1854 to 1905)
Where to see it Ateneum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
Medium Oil on canvas
On a sunny late-summer morning off Haikko, near Porvoo, a brown-tarred rowing boat carries three peasant women, two men, a girl and a small coffin across the calm water. One man pulls at the oars, the girl holds a few yellow flowers, and far off on the bright bay lie low islands and a sailing ship. Edelfelt sets the grief in clear, still light, and the slow progress of the laden boat gives the scene its quiet dignity. The boat is both the family's road and the child's last passage.
The vessels A brown-tarred rowing boat off Haikko, near Porvoo, on the Finnish coast.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Albert Edelfelt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Rowing gig on the Seine at Chatou Unnamed
Oarsmen at Chatou, 1879
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919)
Where to see it National Gallery of Art, Washington
Medium Oil on canvas
On the Seine at Chatou a light rowing boat lies at the grassy bank, a young man seated in it and another in pale boating clothes standing by with a woman, while a sculler and a sailing boat pass on the river beyond. Among Renoir's figures is the painter Gustave Caillebotte, dressed just as his brother Martial appears in Caillebotte's own garden picture, The Orange Trees. Signed and dated 1879, the picture catches the Sunday rowing life of the Paris suburbs, the boat drawn up at the bank as an invitation to the river.
The vessels A light pleasure rowing boat of the kind used by weekend oarsmen on the Seine at Chatou; the boat is not identified.
Sources National Gallery of Art · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Fisherman's punt Unnamed
The Poor Fisherman (Le Pauvre Pêcheur), 1879 to 1881
Artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824 to 1898)
Where to see it Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Medium Oil on canvas
A bearded fisherman stands in his boat with eyes closed and hands crossed, his net in the water, while on the shore a young woman gathers flowers or roots near a small child. Puvis said it showed a fisherman and his two children as personifications of poverty; others read it as an allegory of fate, of faith, even of Christ. It was unlike anything then fashionable at the Salon and was criticised for its supposed lack of realism, yet the young Symbolists took to it with enthusiasm, and the state bought it in 1887. The small boat on the wide grey river is the measure of how little he has.
The vessels A small unnamed river boat, from which the fisherman works his net on a river that fills most of a desolate landscape.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
A Norwegian sailing vessel seen from her deck Unnamed
Port your Helm! (Babord litt), c. 1879
Artist Christian Krohg (1852 to 1925)
Where to see it Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (NG.M.00622)
Medium Oil on canvas
An old sailor in an ochre sou'wester and oilskins stands at the rail and raises his hand, as if calling the order of the title to the helmsman, the shrouds rising behind him and a grey sea beyond. The picture puts us on deck beside him, and it is counted among Krohg's early masterpieces. It opened a thirty-year series: Krohg used the sou'wester as the mark of the Norwegian seafarer in more than fifteen paintings, from Port your Helm! in 1879 to Man Overboard of 1907 to 1908, almost always in ochre yellow. The ship is never shown whole, yet we feel her in every line.
The vessels A sailing vessel seen from her own deck, with her shrouds and rail in view.
Sources Nasjonalmuseet · Wikipedia (NO)
Image: Christian Krohg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Whaling ship trapped in the ice Unnamed
An Incident of Whaling, 1880s
Artist William Bradford (1823 to 1892)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1990.197.1)
Medium Oil on canvas
Bradford began his career painting ships in the whaling port of New Bedford, then made seven expeditions to the Arctic in the 1860s, one of the first American artists to do so. Here he joins the two worlds: a whaler trapped in ice floes, her rigging recorded with a ship portraitist's precision, the light and ice drawn from sketches and photographs made on the spot. The Met notes that he finished it in his New York studio, probably in the 1880s, when American commercial whaling had long been in decline, which lends the scene a note of farewell.
The vessels The whaler is unidentified. Bradford knew such ships from New Bedford, and by the 1880s, when he painted this, American commercial whaling had long been in decline.
Image: William Bradford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Small sailing fishing boat under the moon Unnamed
The Toilers of the Sea, c. 1880 to 1885
Artist Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847 to 1917)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (15.32)
Medium Oil on wood
Ryder grew up in the whaling port of New Bedford, and the sea stayed in his work after he moved to New York in 1870. A sea captain friend remembered him studying the moon on the Hudson to catch its effects. This small panel, which may relate to Victor Hugo's novel of the same name, shows a dark boat under sail beneath a luminous moon and heavy cloud. Ryder's thick layers of paint have altered the surface over time, but the Met still calls it a gemlike work. The lonely boat is the toil and the dream together.
The vessels An unnamed small sailing boat of a single sail, painted as a dark shape on a moonlit sea; the Met does not identify its type.
Sources The Met
Fishermen and working boats · Drawing
Gloucester fishing schooners Unnamed
Two Boys Watching Schooners, 1880
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1933.1244)
Medium Watercolour with graphite on paper
Painted in 1880 during Homer's second visit to Gloucester, the watercolour sets two boys on an enormous rock, a vantage point from which they could keep an eye on the comings and goings of the fishing fleet. Homer paints the boys and the shore in warm tones and the harbour, sky and schooner in cool blues, and the Art Institute reads the contrast as the isolation of those who waited on shore, hoping for the safe return of men who made their living from the sea. The schooner, cool and distant, belongs to the world the boys can only watch.
“the figures and shore (rendered in warm tones) with the cool blue tones of the harbor, sky and schooner”
The vessels A schooner of the Gloucester fishing fleet, whose comings and goings the boys watch from the shore.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Scheveningen bomschuiten Unnamed
Panorama of Scheveningen (Panorama Mesdag), 1881
Artist Hendrik Willem Mesdag (1831 to 1915)
Where to see it Museum Panorama Mesdag, The Hague
Medium Oil on canvas (cylindrical panorama)
Standing on the painted dune in The Hague you are on top of the Seinpostduin in 1881, with the village, the beach and the North Sea all around you, on a canvas 14.7 metres high and some 114 metres round. Mesdag, the marine painter of the Hague School, gave the sky and dunes to Théophile de Bock and the cavalry to Breitner, and kept the boats and the sea for himself. Along the beach lie the bomschuiten of the fishing fleet, and instead of a signature Mesdag painted his wife Sientje at her easel under a white parasol among them. It is one of the oldest surviving panoramas in the world.
The vessels Bomschuiten were flat-bottomed fishing boats developed from the older pink, built to run through the surf and land on the beach, since Scheveningen had no harbour until the early twentieth century.
Sources Wikipedia (NL) · Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows Panorama Mesdag, The Hague, where the original is kept. Photo: Steven Lek, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Étaples fishing boat bringing home a drowned fisherman Unnamed
The Mourners of Étaples (Les Deuillants à Étaples), 1883
Artist Francis Tattegrain (1852 to 1915)
Where to see it Musée de Picardie, Amiens (State purchase, deposited 1885)
Medium Oil on canvas
Two women and a young man stand in the cold surf at Étaples, water to their thighs, waiting for the body of a fisherman lost at sea. One woman holds up a crucifix veiled in black crêpe, the young man grips a sprig of box, the other woman leans her grief against her companion's back. Far out, where grey sky and brown sea merge, the fishing boat and its crew are tiny marks among the waves as they bring their shipmate ashore. The boat is almost nothing in the picture, and that is its power: it carries the whole weight of the family's loss. The painting won a second-class medal at the Salon of 1883.
The vessels An unnamed Étaples fishing boat whose crew carry the body of a drowned shipmate ashore.
Sources Wikipedia (FR)
Image: Francis Tattegrain; photo Bycro, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Home-made bark boat Unnamed
Boys Playing on the Shore, 1884
Artist Albert Edelfelt (1854 to 1905)
Where to see it Ateneum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
Medium Oil on canvas
Three boys play on the shore at Haikko, near Porvoo, with a boat they have made themselves from bark. Edelfelt painted the picture there from August to October 1884. It had a grand journey of its own: bought in Paris for the Empress Dagmar, it went to Russia and was bought back in Leningrad in 1930 by a Helsinki dealer, who sold it to the Ateneum. The little home-made boat is the first vessel of a coastal childhood, and the boys bend over it as seriously as shipwrights.
The vessels A home-made toy boat of bark, a child's plaything, sailed at the water's edge by the three boys in the painting.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Albert Edelfelt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Newlyn luggers and landing boats Unnamed
A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1884 to 1885
Artist Stanhope Forbes (1857 to 1947)
Where to see it The Box, Plymouth (Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery)
Medium Oil on canvas
Forbes settled in Newlyn in February 1884 and began at once on a vast canvas of the boats arriving with the fish, but working outdoors at that size defeated him and in June he turned to this smaller picture. Fish landed from rowing boats is auctioned on the wet sand by the jowster, among fishermen in sou'westers and oilskins and fishwives in heavy aprons, while the lug sails of the Newlyn fleet stand out on the water. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1885, it made his name and drew other painters to Newlyn. The boats frame the whole economy of the beach, before new quays and a fish market changed it.
The vessels The Newlyn fishing fleet worked under lug sails; catches were landed across the open beach in rowing boats and auctioned there, before new quays were built from 1885 and a covered fish market opened in 1908.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Stanhope Forbes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Skagen fishing boat being launched through the surf Unnamed
Launching the Boat. Skagen (Båden sættes i søen. Skagen), 1884
Artist Oscar Björck (1860 to 1929)
Where to see it Skagens Museum, Skagen
Medium Oil on canvas
The Swedish painter Björck came to Skagen in 1882, encouraged by Krøyer whom he had met in Paris, and this is the largest of his open-air paintings there, 160 by 194.5 centimetres. Fishermen launch a boat off the sand into the foaming surf; the man at the bow is Ole Svendsen, a face known from many of Ancher's pictures. Unlike Ancher's Will He Round the Point?, there is no alarm here, only everyday work, and the thick paint gives the surf its froth and the sand its coarseness. The boat in motion between beach and sea is the whole life of the village.
The vessels A Skagen fishing boat launched from the open beach by its crew.
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Scheveningen bomschuit Unnamed
Bluff Bowed Fishing Boat on the Beach at Scheveningen, c. 1885
Artist Jacob Maris (1837 to 1899)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-2810)
Medium Oil on canvas
A bomschuit stands on the beach at Scheveningen with two horses beside it and gulls wheeling over the water. The Rijksmuseum notes that Maris painted such a bluff-bowed fishing boat at least sixteen times, as studies in light and atmosphere; he worked in the studio to escape the changing light, and chose his colours indoors because it was sometimes necessary, he said, to exaggerate in order to learn the power of colour. The humble beach boat becomes a monument, its dark mass holding the whole grey sky together.
“exaggerate in order to learn about the power of colours”
The vessels Bomschuiten were the flat-bottomed fishing boats of the Scheveningen beach; with no harbour, the boats were pulled up onto the sand, as the Rijksmuseum explains for the pinks of the same shore.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia (NL)
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Banks dory and its schooner Unnamed
The Fog Warning (Halibut Fishing), 1885
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Medium Oil on canvas
Painted in Homer's new studio at Prouts Neck, Maine, and first shown as Halibut Fishing, this is a story with no happy ending promised. A lone fisherman in his dory has done well, halibut weigh down the stern, but he turns to measure the distance to his ship as a fog bank rolls in. The Museum of Fine Arts notes that the streamers of fog echo, even mock, his profile. The small dory against the far mother ship makes the whole drama of the Banks fishery visible at a glance: success, isolation and the real chance of being lost.
“The Fog Warning is a painting with a narrative, though its tale is disturbing rather than charming.”
The vessels Banks dories were small, open, flat-bottomed boats, stacked on the decks of fishing schooners that served as mother ships and launched each day with one or two men to fish for cod by handline; fishermen sometimes became separated from their ships.
Sources MFA Boston · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Herring fishing dory Unnamed
The Herring Net, 1885
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1937.1039)
Medium Oil on canvas
A season among the fishing families of Tynemouth in 1881 changed Homer's art, and The Herring Net, painted at Prouts Neck, is one of the fruits. Two men work in a small dory far from the schooners on the horizon: one hauls in the net shining with herring, the other, possibly a boy, unloads the catch. The Art Institute describes the pair striving to steady the precarious boat on the swell. The dory is everything here, a floor that will not keep still, loaded to the gunwales, turning daily work into something heroic.
“the pair strives to steady the precarious boat as it rides the incoming swells”
The vessels A small dory working far from the schooners on the horizon; such dories were carried aboard fishing schooners that served as their mother ships.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Banks dory Unnamed
Lost on the Grand Banks, 1885
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Private collection
Medium Oil on canvas
One of three pictures of the lives of the local fishermen that Homer painted at his Prouts Neck studio in 1885, with The Fog Warning and The Herring Net. Where The Fog Warning leaves open whether the doryman will reach his ship, this canvas shows fishermen in mortal danger: two men in their dory, one peering over the side into the grey murk, with no ship in sight on the heaving sea. It depicts the hard lives of North Atlantic fishermen. Bought by Bill Gates in 1998, reportedly for 30 million dollars, it was then a record price for an American painting.
The vessels A dory of the Grand Banks fishery; such dories were stacked on the decks of fishing schooners and launched each day, and their men sometimes became separated from their mother ships.
Sources Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Deck of a sailing ship Unnamed
Eight Bells, 1886
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts
Medium Oil on canvas
Two sailors at the rail take the noon sight, one reading the sun with his octant while the other reads a completed sight on his. The title is the ship's bell that marks the watch. Homer grew the idea from panels he found and painted in the cabin of his brother's sloop at Prouts Neck, and he kept the ship itself to a few lines of rail and rigging so that the men dominate. Critics of 1888 praised the rolling green waves and the sturdy character of the men; a later biographer saw in them a competence to deal with anything the sea might bring.
“the sturdy, manly character of the sailors at the rail”
The vessels The vessel is not identified; Homer shows only the rail and minimal rigging of a sailing ship. The noon sight at local apparent noon was a standard way of fixing latitude in the days of celestial navigation.
Fishermen and working boats · Drawing
Caique Unnamed
Turkish Boatman in the Constantinople Harbour (Kaikroddare), 1886
Artist Anders Zorn (1860 to 1920)
Where to see it Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Medium Watercolour
On their honeymoon of almost a year Zorn and his wife reached Constantinople by sea in December 1885, and he never forgot waking at the mouth of the Bosphorus to green shores and white minarets after a land of deep snow. He was fascinated by the slender rowing boats called caiques and their oarsmen. “I soon began to paint on the water,” he wrote, and the picture shows it: he sat in the stern, studying the play of the sinewy boatman's muscles, the city shimmering behind. This second version adds an oncoming caique and a larger sailing vessel. Here Zorn's interest in the surface of water began.
The vessels The caique (kaik) was the slender rowing boat of the Bosphorus and Constantinople harbour; Zorn painted one from its stern, looking at the oarsman.
Sources Wikipedia (SV) · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Sand barges on the Rhône at Arles Unnamed
Quay with Men Unloading Sand Barges, 1888
Artist Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890)
Where to see it Museum Folkwang, Essen
Medium Oil on canvas
A few hundred metres behind the Yellow House in Arles, where the railway yard meets the Rhône, Van Gogh looked down from the quay on barges being unloaded. Late in July 1888 he had seen a coal boat there, glistening and wet from a shower, small workmen carrying the cargo ashore, and wrote to Theo that it was pure Hokusai. On 13 August he described the study he was painting: two purplish pink boats, very green water, no sky, a tricolour on the mast, a workman with a wheelbarrow unloading sand. The high viewpoint flattens the barges into bold shapes of colour.
“It was pure Hokusai.”
The vessels Rhône barges unloaded by hand at the quay in Arles: sand by wheelbarrow here, coal carried ashore in the scene he had watched in July.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
A Skagen fishing boat drawn up on the beach Unnamed
Two Fishermen beside a Boat (To fiskere ved en båd), 1889
Artist Michael Ancher (1849 to 1927)
Where to see it Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (KMS1360)
Medium Oil on canvas
Skagen, in the far north of Jutland, was the largest fishing community in Denmark, and its fishermen were by far the most common subject of the painters who gathered there. Michael Ancher, who settled in Skagen, painted them as heroes. Here two bearded, weathered men in sou'westers and oilskins lean on the gunwale of their boat, one with a pipe in his mouth, both gazing out to the side under a heavy grey sky, another boat hauled up on the sand behind them by the sea. The boat anchors them to the shore between trips.
The vessels An open wooden Skagen fishing boat, hauled up on the beach between trips.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Concarneau fishing boats Unnamed
Evening Calm, Concarneau, Opus 220 (Allegro Maestoso), 1891
Artist Paul Signac (1863 to 1935)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975.1.209)
Medium Oil on canvas
Signac, Seurat's most ardent follower, painted five related pictures of fishing boats near Concarneau in Brittany and gave them musical subtitles, suggesting a symphonic arrangement. In this one, dated 1891 and subtitled Allegro maestoso, the fleet lies out on a still evening sea, sails and hulls built of precise hues laid in separate strokes, a technique he said evoked brilliantly coloured lights. The working boats of a Breton port become a pattern of rhythm and harmony, the fleet at rest turned into music.
The vessels Sailing fishing boats of Concarneau in southern Brittany; the Met describes them only as fishing boats near the town, and none is identified.
Sources The Met · Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Volga barges, tug and passenger steamer Unnamed
Fresh Wind. Volga (Svezhiy veter. Volga), 1891 to 1895
Artist Isaac Levitan (1860 to 1900)
Where to see it State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Medium Oil on canvas
Levitan's first sight of the Volga left him disappointed; he wrote to Chekhov that the river seemed dreary and dead. Four years of visits changed him, and this is the joyful result. On a sunny, windy day a tug drives a group of big-masted barges, one under a white sail, one flying the Russian flag and another the Persian, while a white passenger steamer approaches and the two exchange whistles. A lone rower in a pink shirt crosses the foreground. The painter Nesterov said that only Repin's Barge Haulers described the Volga so vividly; here the working river is full of life.
“Perhaps no picture, except for Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga, gives such a vivid, accurate description of the Volga.”
The vessels Self-propelled masted river barges driven by a steam tug, with a passenger steamer approaching; the critic Sofia Prorokova reads the Russian and Persian flags on the barges as the Volga's link, by way of the Caspian, between Russia and the East.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikipedia (RU)
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Rowing boat in Falmouth harbour Unnamed
August Blue, 1893 to 1894
Artist Henry Scott Tuke (1858 to 1929)
Where to see it Tate, London (N01613)
Medium Oil on canvas
Tuke began this in 1893, probably in the open air on a boat in Falmouth harbour, and a rowing boat is the stage for the whole scene: four young bathers in and around it, one holding on to its side in the water, one standing in it with a towel, two sitting at the stern and by the oars. The greenish shadow of the boat falls through clear blue water, and behind, boats with square-rigged sails furled ride at anchor. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1894, it was bought the same year for the Tate, a fresh answer to the lifeless models of academy painting.
The vessels A rowing boat in Falmouth harbour; the vessels anchored behind carry square-rigged sails, furled.
Image: Henry Scott Tuke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Hold of a Valencian fishing boat Unnamed
And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive! (¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro!), 1894
Artist Joaquín Sorolla (1863 to 1923)
Where to see it Museo del Prado, Madrid
Medium Oil on canvas
Two fishermen tend a companion who has been injured, lying in the interior of their boat with his chest bare and a medal, probably of the Virgen del Carmen, patroness of seafarers, at his throat. Around them are the things of a working boat: a lamp, a barrel of fresh water, ropes, a few fish. The title comes from Blasco Ibáñez's novel Flor de Mayo, set on the beaches of the Cabañal in Valencia, where the aunt of a drowned fisherman cries out against those who haggle over the price of fish. The picture won a first-class medal in 1895 and was bought by the state that year.
The vessels The scene is set inside a Valencian fishing boat among the everyday things of the crew; the novel behind the title is set on the beaches of the Cabañal quarter of Valencia.
Sources Wikipedia (ES) · Wikipedia
Image: Joaquín Sorolla, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Fishing boat Unnamed
Lunch on the Boat (La comida en la barca), 1898
Artist Joaquín Sorolla (1863 to 1923)
Where to see it Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid
Medium Oil on canvas
A crew of fishermen and boys gather to prepare their meal aboard their boat, in the shade of the sail, on a large canvas of 180 by 250 centimetres finished in 1898. Sorolla, born in Valencia, was then making his name with big canvases of working life; his Return from Fishing of 1894 had been admired at the Paris Salon and bought by the French state. The Academy of San Fernando bought this picture itself at the National Exhibition of 1899 for 30,000 pesetas. Here the boat is table as well as workplace, the crew resting between labours.
The vessels An unnamed sailing fishing boat; the painting shows several fishermen preparing their meal aboard, under a sail spread over the deck.
Sources Wikipedia (ES) · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Joaquín Sorolla, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Rowing boat with children handline fishing Unnamed
Chadding in Mount's Bay, 1902
Artist Stanhope Forbes (1857 to 1947)
Where to see it Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum
Medium Oil on canvas
Here Forbes, a founding member of the Newlyn School, turns from the hardship of fishing to its summer side: a rowing boat of children handline fishing, a pastime known locally as chadding, on the water of Mount's Bay. The painting reflects the influence of Impressionism on the colony. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1902 and acquired by Worcester City Art Gallery in 1914, it has been voted the most popular work in the gallery's collection. The small boat, rocking on the bay, holds a whole childhood by the sea.
The vessels A small rowing boat of children handline fishing, known locally as chadding, in Mount's Bay, Cornwall.
Sources Wikipedia
Image: Stanhope Forbes, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Drawing
Bahamian-type fishing sloops at Key West Unnamed
Fishing Boats, Key West, 1903
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (10.228.1)
Medium Watercolour and graphite on paper
Although Homer's title places it at Key West, the Met notes that the watercolour appears to show typical Bahamian fishing boats, a reminder of the many Black Bahamians who moved to Key West after the Civil War to pursue familiar maritime trades. Homer worked with a rapid application of fluid washes and a carefully calculated use of the white paper, and drew the rigging and sails with lyrical graphite lines that make the sea breeze almost visible. It is a record of a working boat made at the speed of the wind that drives her.
The vessels The Met identifies them as typical Bahamian fishing boats, the craft of Bahamian fishermen who had settled at Key West.
Fishermen and working boats · Drawing
Small sailing boat at Key West, a sailor stowing her sail Unnamed
Stowing Sail, 1903
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1933.1252)
Medium Watercolour over graphite on paper
Homer painted this sheet on 22 December 1903, during his winter visit to Key West, and it keeps the speed of the moment. A man gathers in the sail of his boat; Homer's quick graphite lines fix the main contours, and changes in the underdrawing show that the figure was first leaning further forward, as though Homer was working fast to keep up with him. Washes laid wet into wet let the colours run, so that a heavy red stroke at the bow bleeds into the blue shadow on the side. It is a portrait of work on the water made almost as fast as the work itself.
“the heavy, red stroke at the front of the boat”
The vessels A small local sailing boat, painted at Key West, where Homer indulged his interest in the details of local boating.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago · Wikipedia
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Canoe on the Saguenay rapids Unnamed
Shooting the Rapids, Saguenay River, 1905 to 1910
Artist Winslow Homer (1836 to 1910)
Where to see it Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11.57)
Medium Oil on canvas with chalk
Left unfinished in Homer's studio when he died, this canvas was inspired, the family said, by an especially perilous run down the rapids of the Saguenay in remote Quebec. The frightened passenger gripping the sides of the canoe is his older brother Charles, his frequent companion on fishing trips, while the guides fight the white water. The Met observes that of all the men in boats Homer painted across his career, it is fitting that the last remains in a liminal state. The unfinished canoe is caught forever in the moment of danger.
“Of the many images of men in boats painted across Homer's career, it is fitting that the last one remains in a liminal state”
The vessels A river canoe worked by guides, here carrying Homer's brother Charles down the rapids of the Saguenay in remote Quebec on what family stories recall as an especially perilous run.
Sources The Met
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
Achill currach Unnamed
Launching the Currach, 1910 to 1911
Artist Paul Henry (1876 to 1958)
Where to see it National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Medium Oil on canvas
Paul Henry studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and with Whistler, returned to Ireland in 1910 and lived on Achill Island until 1919, learning to capture the peculiar interplay of light and landscape of the west of Ireland. Launching the Currach belongs to those first Achill years, painted in 1910 to 1911, and its subject is work and the sea: islanders getting the light boat afloat. In the 1920s and 1930s Henry became Ireland's most renowned artist and did much to shape the popular image of the west, and here, near the start, it is the currach that carries that image.
The vessels The currach is a type of Irish boat with a wooden frame over which animal skins or hides were once stretched, though canvas later became more usual.
Sources Wikipedia
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, where the original is kept. Photo: David Kernan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Painting
A sailing ship seen from aloft Unnamed
Aloft (Til Værs), undated
Artist Christian Krohg (1852 to 1925)
Where to see it Norwegian Maritime Museum, Oslo (NSM.K02978)
Medium Oil on paper mounted on cardboard
Krohg takes us up into the rigging. A seaman in oilskins and sou'wester hangs over the yard, struggling with a heavy sail that bellies around him, while far below the rail of the ship slants across the corner of the picture. There is no horizon to hold on to, only canvas, rope and wind. Krohg painted Norwegian seamen again and again over thirty years, the sou'wester his mark of the seafarer, and here he gives the hardest part of their work, handling sail high aloft. The ship itself is felt rather than seen.
The vessels A square-rigged Norwegian sailing vessel; sailors went aloft onto the yards to reef and furl the sails by hand.
Sources digitaltmuseum.no · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia (NO)
Image: Christian Krohg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Fishermen and working boats · Print
Whaleboat stove by a sperm whale, with a whaleship Unnamed
Cachalot Fishery (Pêche du Cachalot), undated
Artist After Ambroise-Louis Garneray (1783 to 1857)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAJ2543)
Medium Aquatint and etching
In Moby-Dick Herman Melville called two large French engravings after paintings by 'one Garnery', showing attacks on the sperm and the right whale, the finest pictures of whales and whaling to be found anywhere. In the sperm whale scene, he wrote, the whale rises beneath the boat and lifts the shattered planks high on its back, an oarsman leaps from the prow as if from a precipice, the line tub and harpoons float on the whitened sea, and the ship bears down out of the black stormy distance. Melville did not know who Garnery was, but judged the action wonderfully good and true.
“a noble Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from the profundities of the ocean”
The vessels Sperm whales were hunted from open whaleboats lowered from a whaleship, and a struck whale could smash a boat, as Melville describes in this subject. The boat and ship are unnamed.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · gutenberg.org
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where the original is kept. Photo: TxllxT, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
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