Unloading the ferry, sunset

Painted in the mid-1850s, as Constant Troyon worked regularly among the rich farmlands and broad river estuaries of coastal Normandy, Unloading the Ferry, Sunset brings together Troyon's exceptional skill as a painter of animals with his equally distinctive command of broad landscape vistas and striking light effects. Since an 1847 trip to Holland, Troyon had taken great interest in seventeenth-century Dutch animal and landscape painting, and his many pictures of ferrymen and their barges are an homage to van Goyen and Cuyp as well as a celebration of more modern nineteenth-century landscape strategies. A second version of Unloading the Ferry, Sunset, with variations in the arrangement of the cows and without the passeur's (ferryman's) signal post at the right, belongs to the Louvre, Paris (R.F. 1962-23).
We are grateful to Alexandra Murphy for preparing this catalogue entry.