Signed French Maritime Scene on Board

Signed French Maritime Scene on Board

France | Second Half of the 19th Century

Low tide on a northern French beach, painted in the long horizontal format that suits this subject and almost nothing else. A two-masted coaster lies careened on the wet sand with the tricolore at her masthead, waiting for the water to come back for her. Smaller boats sit further out with their sails slack, figures work the strand in the foreground, and the whole scene takes place beneath a sky that occupies more than half the panel and does most of the work.

It is a small painting that behaves like a large one. The palette is held to greys, blue-greens and wet sand brown, with the entire colour budget spent in four places: the flag, a blue cap, a stroke of orange, and the white of a woman's coif. The handling is quick and confident, the figures set down with a very fine brush over a broadly scumbled ground, in the working manner of the painters who made a genre of the Normandy tide line through the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Signed lower right. The signature is small, thinly painted and sunk into the sand tones around it, and it does not resolve cleanly under ordinary light.

Housed in a gilt frame with a bead-and-reel inner edge, in excellent condition. 

12.25" x 8"

Details

• Medium: Oil on board
• Signature: Signed lower right, indistinctly
• Subject: Beach at low tide with beached coaster and figures, French coast
• Frame: Gilt frame with bead-and-reel inner edge, excellent condition
• Date: France, second half of the 19th century