En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish)

En route pour la peche (Setting Out to Fish), painted in 1878, is one of Sargent's earliest major works, painted when he was just 22. It depicts a group of fishermen and their families on a beach, preparing to launch their boats into a gray, misty sea. The composition, with its low horizon and silvery tonality, reveals the influence of Whistler and the French Naturalists. Sargent had recently arrived in Paris to study under Carolus-Duran, the fashionable portraitist who taught him to paint rapidly, directly, and in a limited palette. This painting, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1878, demonstrated that the young American had absorbed the lessons of his master while already exceeding them in freshness and spontaneity. The painting's most striking quality is its atmospheric unity. The entire scene is bathed in a silvery light that merges sea, sky, sand, and figures into a single tonal field - an effect that anticipates the muted palette of Sargent's later Venetian scenes. The figures, though precisely observed, are subordinated to this atmospheric envelope, suggesting that Sargent's real subject is not the fishermen but the light and air in which they move.

Sargent's early genre paintings demonstrated a remarkable range that his later career as a society portraitist would partially obscure. En route pour la peche reveals a Sargent drawn to ordinary working life and atmospheric painting - a direction he would pursue in his watercolors and travel sketches long after he became famous for his portraits.

This painting captures the young Sargent before fame narrowed his options. It reveals an artist capable of painting the poetry of gray weather with the same authority he would later bring to the glamour of high society - proof that his gifts were more various than his reputation suggests.