Fishing for Oysters at Cancale

In March 1878 a group of younger American painters, many of them back from training in Europe, opened the first exhibition of their new Society of American Artists in New York, set up as an alternative to the conservative National Academy of Design. Sargent, then 22 and living in Paris, sent them this canvas, and it became the first of his paintings ever shown in America. He had made it from studies done the summer before at Cancale, a fishing town on the Brittany coast. Women and children carry baskets across the wet sand toward the oyster beds, their reflections caught in the pools at their feet, with a lighthouse on the rise at the right. A larger, more finished version of the same scene went to the Paris Salon that spring. The New York critics praised this smaller one for its silvery colour and its sea air. It was bought by Samuel Colman, a New York landscape painter 24 years older than Sargent, who according to the museum wanted it as a standard to emulate. Lower right, the signature reads J.S. Sargent, Paris.