
The Fisherman's Family
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes · 1887
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original size
- 82.5 × 71.8 cm (32 1/2 × 28 1/4 in.); Framed: 102.9 × 91.4 × 10.2 cm (40 1/2 × 36 × 4 in.)
- Currently held
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Movement
- Impressionism
The Fisherman's Family carries the quiet gravity that made Pierre Puvis de Chavannes one of the most admired painters of nineteenth-century France — a coastal scene rendered not as reportage but as meditation. Puvis worked in a manner deliberately unlike the painterly bravura fashionable among his contemporaries. He built his compositions with simplified, almost sculptural figures, a flattened sense of space, and a pale, matte palette refined to evoke the dry luminosity of ancient fresco. The result feels timeless rather than dated: his fishermen and their families inhabit a world stripped of anecdote, reduced to essentials. It is this quality that made him a touchstone for Gauguin, Seurat, and the young Picasso, who each found in his work a way past the noise of academic painting. Among the many public buildings that sought his decorative work — the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, the Boston Public Library — Puvis returned repeatedly to working people by the sea, figures absorbed in the elemental rhythms of labour, rest, and shore. This hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully renders Puvis's signature palette and the hushed stillness that defines the original, held today in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Hand-painted oil reproduction
Painted in real oil on stretched canvas by master copyists. Delivered unframed — ready to frame at home.
Choose a size
In Chavannes's style.
Send us a photograph of your family, pet, or home — we'll paint it as a custom oil on stretched canvas in any style you like. From £220.

← Real customer commission · see the full gallery
Code WELCOME20 at checkout for 20% off your first commission.
Commission yours →




