Fishermen by a Lake 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted 'Fishermen by a Lake' with oil on canvas in France in the late 19th or early 20th century. It offers a fleeting view of working-class leisure, a slice of everyday life among the labouring classes of France. But look closer: the very act of depicting leisure was something new. It emerged alongside a changing social landscape as industrialization allowed working people more free time, and as class boundaries were being negotiated and renegotiated. The image may seem conventional, but in its time, the Impressionists' choice to focus on such quotidian scenes was radical. It challenged the art establishment's preference for historical and mythological subjects, and it democratized art by suggesting that beauty and meaning could be found in the everyday. To fully understand such a work, we need to dig into archives, newspapers and popular culture. These sources reveal the ways in which artists both reflected and shaped the changing social norms of their time. Art is never made in a vacuum, and its meanings are always contingent on the world around it.