Monumental despite its relatively small size, this extraordinarily rich drawing is perhaps the finest of Gericault's regrettably few watercolor landscapes. It is a preparatory study for the painting Morning: Landscape with Fishermen (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and is thus connected to the Museum's mural panel Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (acc. no. 1989.183), another in the suite of three scenes from 1818 called The Times of Day. To represent morning Gericault imagined fishermen at sunrise, hauling in their nets and skiff in a landscape of operatic grandeur. Alpine mountains, Roman ruins, and gigantic tropical trees dwarf the busy muscular men in the foreground, but their labor imparts energy to every corner of the scene, as does the artist's brisk and lavish penwork.

Other sketches by Gericault now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, show tiny figures dragging boats and are probably connected with this project. Two more drawings, in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, are also related. The Metropolitan's watercolor, however, is the most elaborately worked of the group and is closest to the finished painting.