Le bateau de pêche

Le bateau de pêche (The Fishing Boat) at the Winterthur Museum, painted around 1908, is a maritime subject from Vuillard's summer visits to Normandy with the Hessel family — the Normandy coast providing occasional working-life subjects that contrasted with the domestic interiors forming the bulk of his output. Villerville, near Honfleur on the Calvados coast, was one of his regular summer destinations with the Hessels, and the fishing boats of the Normandy harbors provided him with subjects quite different from the enclosed domestic spaces he typically inhabited. His marine subjects have the freshness of occasional excursions into unfamiliar territory — the outdoor palette lighter and more luminous than his interiors, the brushwork relatively free and exploratory rather than the careful surface-building of his finished domestic works. The Winterthur Museum's holding of this canvas alongside other Vuillard subjects provides a Swiss institutional context for the range of his subject matter beyond the domestic interiors for which he is primarily known.

The fishing boat's hull provides a strong formal element in a composition organised around horizontal bands of sea, vessel, and sky. Vuillard's outdoor palette is lighter and more luminous than his interiors, and the brushwork is relatively free and sketchy compared to the more finished surfaces of his domestic commissions.