Low Tide at Cancale Harbor

Cancale, on the Breton coast, stands on the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, where the tides are among the largest in Europe. At spring tides the sea there rises and falls by more than ten metres, and at low water the boats in the harbour settle on the mud. Sargent dated this small, upright canvas 1878, when he was 22. He was looking north along the sea wall at La Houle, the harbour of Cancale, with a sailing boat lying alongside it. The dark ramp in the picture led down from the lighthouse into the harbour, and it has since been replaced by a stone slipway. The whole canvas is barely half a metre high. By 1916 it belonged to Zoe Oliver Sherman, a Boston collector, and in 1922 she gave it to the museum.