Fishing Boat

As the Prussian armies closed in on Paris in the autumn of 1870, the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel took his stock to London. On 10 December he opened a gallery at 168 New Bond Street with the first exhibition of what he called the Society of French Artists, and between then and 1875 Millet had 37 paintings in its shows. Millet spent the war in Cherbourg, near the coast where he grew up, and that winter he sent pictures from Normandy to Durand-Ruel. This small seascape is dated 1871, and the museum's record places it, probably, with Durand-Ruel in London and Paris. It is only 33 centimetres wide. A fishing boat with a single patched sail heels over in a rough green sea, two men aboard, the spray breaking white along its side. At the left a stone jetty runs out into the water and ends in a white lighthouse, under a grey sky that is starting to break up.