Et sardineri i Concarneau

Women sort and pack sardines along long trestle tables in a Breton curing works, the silver of the fish set against the shadow of the shed. Krøyer painted the scene during the months he spent at Concarneau on the Breton coast in 1879, one of the first foreign painters to work in the fishing town, and signed it “SKrøyer Concarneau -79”; he sent it to the Paris Salon the following year. He was twenty-eight, and had spent the decade turning away from the academy’s historical subjects toward the working life in front of him. The low viewpoint, the patient, unglamorous labour and the refusal of anecdote place the picture in the Nordic naturalism of the years around 1880, and it remains one of the clearest records of the sardine industry that then dominated the Breton coast. It entered one of the great Danish private collections of the period: bought from the artist by the merchant and collector Bernhard Hirschsprung in 1896 for 2,000 kroner, and acquired by the museum at the Hirschsprung estate auction of 1911. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).