Landscape with Fishermen

This copper takes its subject from a picture by Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese master whose landscapes shaped Grimaldi as a young painter, as the scholar Dorota Batorska has proposed. Carracci's Fishing is a canvas more than two and a half metres wide. It belonged to Prince Camillo Pamphilj in Rome until 1665, when he gave it to Louis XIV, so by the time this version was painted, around 1678, the original was already in France. Here the scene shrinks to a copper plate less than 70 centimetres across. On the near bank the catch has been tipped onto the ground. One man kneels over the fish, another reaches toward them, and a boatman sits in his boat holding a long pole. A couple in fine clothes stands beside him, watching, while the river bends away toward a house by a bridge.