Fish

Eugène Boudin was the son of a mariner, and he spent the majority of his career on the coast in Normandy. His large corpus of work is filled with paintings and drawings of harbors, rivers, and coasts. Aside from these landscapes, he also made many still lifes that were influenced by the Dutch genre painters of the seventeenth century. Such an influence is particularly noticeable in this watercolor, possibly prepared as a study for a painting. Boudin has painted two groups of fish on the same sheet, as if undecided about the compositional details. Each group contains a white fish lying diagonally at the lower left, which is a compositional detail employed in the still-life painting of fish currently in a private collection, dated ca. 1853-1856 (Robert Schmit, Eugène Boudin, 1824-1898. vol. 1. Paris, 1983, no. 50, p. 20).