The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Breton Fishermen and Their Families

Breton Fishermen and Their Families

This artwork is part of Street

This artwork is not on display

Gallery Label

Toward the end of his life, Ribot, who was strongly influenced by seventeenth-century Spanish painters, especially Ribera, brought a vigorous realism and a predilection for contrasting values to the subject of Breton and Norman peasants. Beginning in the 1870s, he painted several group portraits similar to this one.
Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Inscription: Signed (lower left): t Ribot.
Provenance

Ernest Cronier, Paris (until d. 1905; his estate sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, December 4–5, 1905, no. 66, as "Les Pêcheurs bretons"); Mrs. Edward Spencer (Catherine D.) Wentworth, Paris, later Santa Barbara, Calif. (by 1937–d. 1948)
Exhibition History

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Van Gogh as Critic and Self-Critic," October 30, 1973–January 6, 1974, no. 32 (as "Breton Fishermen").
References

Charles Sterling, and Margaretta M. Salinger. "XIX Century." French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2, New York, 1966, p. 138, ill., call it "Breton Fishermen" and state that it must have been painted at either Brest or Trouville after 1880; note the influence of Ribera.

Charles S. Moffett. Van Gogh as Critic and Self-Critic. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1973, unpaginated, no. 32, dates it probably after 1880; describes it as depicting "the coarse reality of the peasants' world without a single passage of refined, academically correct painting".