In the first of these two articles, I showed narrative paintings of angling, fishing with rod and line. I conclude here with examples of landscapes and other non-narrative works incorporating anglers and other small-scale fisherfolk.
Among a batch of Goya’s painted cartoons to be turned into tapestries for the Spanish royal family, in October 1776, was The Angler, one of several narrow vertical panels, and the only one to show fishing with rod and line.
In Thomas Girtin’s view of Ripon Minster, Yorkshire (1800), it’s the features of the river – its bridge, cattle, and a single angler – that steal the gaze, rather than the bulk of the minster behind.
Constant Troyon’s undated Anglers could easily have shown a moment in John Constable’s rural Suffolk, although this must be somewhere deep in rural France.
Henri Harpignies was another French landscape painter who included anglers in several of his rustic views, including this Angler, painted in 1883, by which time the artist was well into his sixties.
Although I’m sure that some Impressionist landscapes include the occasional angler, such staffage doesn’t appear to have been common among the core members of the movement.
Armand Guillaumin’s River Scene (1890) shows the bustling life alongside the River Seine in Paris, here with a whole party of anglers, and two yachts under sail. For much of his career, Guillaumin had to work for a living in menial jobs, and never achieved recognition as a painter. The year after he painted this, he won a hundred thousand francs in the state lottery, and was finally able to devote much of his time to art, but by that time fame had passed him by.
Jules-Alexis Muenier’s undated Angler by the Stream is a pastoral view at the edge of a village, showing a fisherman working the river close to a small wooden bridge. A woman, possibly his wife, is crossing the bridge and appears to have stopped to talk to him from there. Behind her are two magnificently pollarded trees.
During the winter of 1916-17, the great Canadian landscape painter and canoeist Tom Thomson was encouraged to tackle a series of larger works based on his sketches from the previous year. The Fisherman (1916-17) is a medium-sized canvas which surprisingly was rated poorly by critics. This is probably the closest that Thomson came to figurative painting, and appears to have been carefully composed to bring together the brilliantly lit fisherman and rocks behind, the shaded rock wall at the back of the river, and the broken water and fractured reflections on its surface. Lying on the rock at the lower right is a large fish, one that definitely didn’t get away.
Although not using a rod and line, fishing for other types of seafood has also been carried out on a similar small scale.
François Musin’s undated Old Lighthouse with Shrimpers shows one of a series of lighthouses built at Knokke, amid sand dunes on the coast of Belgium. Shrimping with nets like this has also been used as a holiday activity when on the coast.
One of John Singer Sargent’s early successes is his Impressionist Fishing for Oysters at Cançale, from 1878, showing locals going to gather the valuable shellfish on the beach of this small town on the north coast of Brittany, France, not far from Saint Malo.
In the following summer, Pierre-Auguste Renoir visited the Channel coast further to the east, where he painted this small family group of Mussel-Fishers at Berneval, Normandy Coast (1879). This was exhibited at the Salon the following year, and later purchased from the artist by Durand-Ruel.
Although most paintings of anglers depict men in the role, it has also been common in many areas for women to fish with rod and line.
It took Eva Gonzalès, though, to show a young woman, possibly the artist’s sister, In a Boat (c 1875-76) and fishing.
Humans are by no means the only animals with a taste for fish, or the desire for a bit of sport.
Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s watercolour The Gilded Apple, from 1899 shows a fairytale princess being thrown the gilded apple of its title. In the foreground there’s a cat sizing up a takeaway from the water.