Fishing

In 1665 Prince Camillo Pamphilj, nephew of the late Pope Innocent X, gave the young Louis XIV a pair of wide canvases by Annibale Carracci, this river scene and its companion, a hunt. They were already old pictures by then. Carracci had painted them in Bologna, and the Louvre dates them only to the last quarter of the 1500s, though scholars usually place them in the later 1580s. What the king received was everyday life given a whole canvas, with no saint or myth in it. Two men wade into the river hauling a net, a woman in a straw hat works in a boat heaped with fish, and on the right a fisherman holds up his catch for a fashionably dressed party. High on a broken stump above them, almost lost in the leaves, sits an owl.