La pêche miraculeuse. Esquisse.

This 1850 sketch for The Miraculous Draught of Fishes was one of several religious compositions Chassériau was developing in that year as part of his mature engagement with large-scale church decoration and biblical narrative. The subject — from the Gospel of John, in which Christ directs the disciples to cast their nets and find them filled to breaking — had been treated by Raphael in his famous tapestry cartoon, and Chassériau's engagement with the subject implies a conscious dialogue with that tradition. The Louvre holds this sketch alongside other preparatory works that document Chassériau's compositional thinking before committing to finished canvases. As a sketch, it shows his working method: establishing figure groupings, spatial organisation, and tonal relationships before resolving individual passages.

The sketch format allows looser, more experimental handling than in finished works. Figure groups are established as broad tonal masses before individual details are resolved. The composition shows Chassériau testing the spatial and human drama of the miraculous moment — the straining figures, the full nets — within the constraints of his religious narrative tradition.