Pierre PUVIS DE CHAVANNES France 1824 – 1898 The poor fisherman
[Le pauvre pêcheur] 1881 oil on canvas canvas 155.5 (h) x 192.5
(w) cm Musée d'Orsay, Paris , Purchase from the artist 1887 ©
RMN (Musée d'Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski Puvis (who had studied
under, among other teachers, Eugène Delacroix)1 was hailed by a
younger generation of artists, including Seurat, Gauguin and
Denis, as a leader of the Symbolist movement. While Puvis
ardently denied any links with Symbolism, many of his works—and
this one in particular—are imbued with the mystical qualities so
characteristic of that style. This monumental work shows a
widowed fisherman waiting despondently for a catch while his
young daughter, left to care for her baby sibling, picks flowers
on the shore.2 He intended the painting as a social comment:
concerned with the plight of the underprivileged, he stated that
‘the true poor people, damn it, are invisible’.3 By employing at
the easel the scale and techniques he had learned as a
celebrated muralist,4 he att