Fishermen Preparing their Nets and Anglers by a Mediterranean Port

The Vernet were a family of artists. Antoine Vernet (1689–1753) was a prosperous artisan painter in Avignon, to whom some decorated coach panels (Avignon, Mus. Calvet) are attributed. Of his three sons, Joseph Vernet earned a reputation throughout Europe as a landscape and marine painter, receiving the commission from Louis XV for the series Ports of France. Jean-Antoine Vernet (1716–1755) also painted seascapes, and François Vernet (1730–79) was a decorative painter; their respective sons, Louis-François Vernet (1744–84) and Joseph Vernet the younger (1760–1792), were both active in Paris as sculptors. Joseph’s son Carle Vernet, a painter and lithographer, became known for his pictures of horses and battle scenes, though his achievement was overshadowed not only by his father’s but by that of his son Horace Vernet, a prolific and highly successful painter, especially of battle scenes. The family was connected by marriage to several other notable French artists, Carle becoming father-in-law of Hippolyte Lecomte and Horace that of Paul Delaroche; Carle’s sister Emilie married the architect Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin.
Claude Joseph Vernet, the author of this river landscape probably received his first lessons in painting from his father, Antoine, who then encouraged him to move to the studio of Philippe Sauvan (1697–1792), the leading master in Avignon. Sauvan supplied altarpieces to local churches and decorative works and mythologies for the grand houses in the area. After this apprenticeship Vernet worked in Aix-en-Provence with the decorative painter Jacques Viali (1681–1745), who also painted landscapes and marine pictures. In 1731 Vernet independently produced a suite of decorative overdoors for the hôtel of the Marquise de Simiane at Aix-en-Provence; at least two of these survive (in situ) and are Vernet’s earliest datable landscapes. These are early indications of his favored type of subject, and Vernet would have studied works attributed to such 17th-century masters as Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and Salvator Rosa (in private collections at Aix and Avignon). Three years later Joseph de Seytres, Marquis de Caumont, who had previously recommended Vernet to the Marquise de Simiane, offered to sponsor a trip to Italy for him. This was partly for Vernet to complete his artistic education but also to provide his sponsor with drawings of antiquities.
This drawing of a riverbank with a fisherman is typically balanced with animated views which evoke the charm of the countryside and a port in Provence.