El pobre pescador

At the Salon of 1881 most critics disliked this painting. Puvis de Chavannes had stripped it almost bare, a gaunt widower standing in his boat with his head bowed, his two small children on the pale bank behind, everything drained to chalky greens and greys with no depth or polish. To eyes trained on glossy Salon finish it looked unfinished and cold. But a handful of much younger painters saw something else in its flatness and quiet, among them Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who were about to build a new art out of exactly this kind of stillness. Seurat later painted his own small landscape after it. The French state would not buy the picture until 1887, the first of Puvis's works it ever acquired.