Between 1753 and 1765 Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) completed fifteen views of the ports of France in fulfillment of a royal commission; he abandoned the project before visiting Brest. This port in Brittany, a major naval station, had been rebuilt, and the secretary of state for the navy wished to present evidence of the improvements to the King following a series of devastating fires in the 1740s. He hired Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe (1716–1794), who requested that his son Henri Joseph accompany him (the two worked in collaboration from 1769 until 1778); they prepared six watercolor and gouache studies of the port between January 18 and April 2, 1773.[1] These were the first step in the commission to "create for the Department of the Navy all the views of the interior and of the exterior of the city and port of Brest." The studies (Musée du Louvre, Paris) provided information for finished views, and were supplemented by drawings made "sur le vif" (from the life) of figures on the water and animating the banks.
In a letter of 1774 from Louis Nicolas to Antoine de Sartine (1729–1801), the new secretary of state for the navy, four finished paintings are mentioned, three by Louis Nicolas and one by Henri Joseph. Two had been delivered, including one by Henri Joseph made for "le cabinet de Monseigneur à Versailles" (the office of [Sartine] at Versailles). This is likely a larger oil painting dated 1774 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest). It is generally assumed that the canvases are by Henri Joseph, as Louis Nicolas worked more or less exclusively in gouache. It may also be that the father completed the architecture, sky, and water while the son imagined the staffage. The Met's painting follows the 1773 Louvre study (see fig. 1 above) that is inscribed "Tableau du port de Brest pris de la mâture (L'avant-port de Brest)," or "Painting of the Harbor of Brest taken from the Masting Machine (The Outer Harbor of Brest)." A masting machine was employed to lower a mast timber into holes cut in the decks of a ship. The drawing gives a clear sense of a topographical stage set, replete with a key listing the various buildings that provided documentation from their visit to which lively staffage could be added to invest the image with a sense of a bustling port. Such transformations are apparent in The Met painting and also in known snuffboxes (Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire) and a gouache dated 1776 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brest) by Louis-Nicolas that is closely based on The Met painting but accommodates some changes in architecture.
Like the cast of characters from contemporary urban life imagined by the Venetian view painters, the Van Blarenberghes’ recollections of the port once back in Paris offer a strikingly immediate sense of daily life: furniture and paintings have been propped against a building in order to display them for sale (closely comparable to the sellers of secondhand goods represented in Canaletto’s
Campo Sant’Angelo, Venice [
2019.141.5]), a man naps in the shade of a guardsman’s post house, and women take water from the public fountain and barter for fruit and grain.
A ship with a Danish flag probably corresponds with activity at a house at number 137 of the quai, owned by the vice-consul of Denmark, one of the highest taxpayers in Brest. At the center of the painting a ship known as the Oiseau is being prepared by convicts identifiable by their red uniforms. White uniforms identify soldiers of the Régiment d’Île de France who would set sail under captain Charles-Louis Saulx de Rosenevet for La Réunion and Bourbon, French colonial islands in the Indian Ocean where enslaved labor produced lucrative crops that enriched the metropole.[2]
Katharine Baetjer 2010; updated David Pullins 2024
[1] On the rich iconography of the port of Brest in the eighteenth century and the Van Blarenberghes' place within it, see Boulaire and Besseliève 2024.
[2] For these identifications see Boulaire and Besseliève 2024, pp. 74–79, 88–91. Thank you for emailed communication with M. Jean-Pierre Souquet for further explication.
