Bisquine Cancalaise 1929

Jules Lefranc, born in 1887, painted this boat with oil on canvas, and the colors have a stark, elemental feel. The sails are these big, vertical triangles and the masts cut across them like dark lines in space. I can imagine the artist making this. The thing about painting water is that you can lose yourself trying to capture the movement, the surface, the light. Here, the artist has used broad brushstrokes of greens and blues, and you can almost feel the boat moving through it. This feels like a painting about motion, about the relationship between the boat, the sea, and the sky. It has this real sense of immediacy. It reminds me of some of Marsden Hartley’s seascapes. You know, artists are always in conversation with each other, across time, learning, borrowing, riffing. Painting lets us capture a feeling, a moment, and lets the viewer enter that space to find their own meaning.