National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Luce used landscape compositions such as Camaret, moonlight and fishing boats to explore formal issues of colour and light as well as his own political concerns. The painting depicts fishing boats at night in the protected harbour of Camaret, a small fishing village in Brittany on the Atlantic coast. It is executed in Luce’s characteristic divisionist style, distinguished by the building up of the painted surface using separate brushstrokes of colour. The artist employs varying shades of green and periwinkle blue, along with pink and yellow for the night sky. Violet, blue, turquoise and deep pink splotches, along with green and lemon-yellow strokes serve for the areas of shadowed and moonlit water. Deep blues, purples and near-blacks make up the silhouetted shapes of the fishing boats. By 1887 Luce had adopted the divisionist technique first developed by Seurat, a fellow French Neo-Impressionist artist. The technique was based on theories about colour and seeing, which asserted that the eye would blend colou