Dark groups of figures stand out against the light of the pale blue and silver sky. A huddled procession comes over the windswept dunes: two fishermen are carrying the body of dead man. His head is turned away from us, but his body has turned blue and his right arm hangs limply beneath him. A woman further back points out to the brown sea, where a boat is stranded on a reef. Another, presumably the widow, walks ahead of everyone else with her two children; she is looking down with an almost blank expression. The little girl to the left stares at the ground in front of her, while the little boy’s face is full of sorrow. He is confronting us directly, and clings to his mother’s arm.
The landscape is painted with broad, rapid brushstrokes. Thick white impasto marks the foaming waves and bands of clouds. The painter’s signature in the left bottom corner blends in with the spiky tufts of dune grass that give the sandy terrain some structure. Israëls’s gloomy palette consists of mostly greyish tints – the only colourful highlights are the red details of the traditional costumes of the fishermen community.
The composition was probably painted in Amsterdam in 1861, from studies made in Zandvoort, a fishing village near Haarlem. Israëls spent several months in Zandvoort, and became interested in the tragic lives of the fishermen and their families. The subject of the drowned fisherman was not new, but Israëls painted it with unprecedented sympathy. He has depicted restrained emotions that are much more powerful than the theatrical poses employed by other artists. Probably inspired by funeral scenes, particularly by the French realist painters, Israëls would have known works by Gustave Courbet (Buriel at Ornans in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton (La Plantation d’un Calvaire in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille). The composition recalls images of the Deposition, when Christ’s body was removed from the Cross, and by using an unusually large format for what is essentially a genre scene, Israëls has elevated the subject of the fisherman’s tragic fate to the realm of history painting.
Fishermen carrying a Drowned Man is one of a series of four paintings Israëls produced on the theme of the death of a fisherman during a ten-year period. This one is the largest. It signified a breakthrough in Israëls’s career, greatly impressing the critics when it appeared in successive exhibitions in Paris, Antwerp and London in the 1860s and establishing the artist’s reputation in France and England. The painting remained in England (in a private collection) after it was shown at the International Exhibition in 1862, and was donated to the National Gallery in 1910.
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