Turner to Monet Luce used landscape compositions such as
Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats to explore formal issues of
colour and light as well as his own political concerns. The
painting depicts fishing boats at night in the protected harbour
of Camaret, a small fishing village in Brittany on the Atlantic
coast. It is executed in Luce’s characteristic divisionist
style, distinguished by the building up of the painted surface
using separate brushstrokes of colour. The artist employs
varying shades of green and periwinkle blue, along with pink and
yellow for the night sky. Violet, blue, turquoise and deep pink
splotches, along with green and lemon-yellow strokes serve for
the areas of shadowed and moonlit water. Deep blues, purples and
near-blacks make up the silhouetted shapes of the fishing boats.
By 1887 Luce had adopted the divisionist technique first
developed by Seurat, a fellow French Neo-Impressionist artist.
The technique was based on theories about colour and seeing,
which asserted that the eye wo