Seurat's Fisherwoman of the Grande Jatte, Feminist Figure or Licentious One?
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 3 min read
The banks of waterways were the setting for a new outdoor sociability: that of fishing.
Painters and illustrators regularly immortalised the elegance of strollers and the tranquility of nature, and occasionally the presence of a fisherman. The fact remains that the fisherwoman remained a curiosity. She is, however, the only one among the strollers in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte armed with a fishing rod.
Does Seurat celebrate the emancipation of a leisure activity that was previously masculine, or does he conceal the eternal licentious subjugation of the feminine?
Fishing: A Virile Masculine Activity
The historian Alain Corbin, in his The Lure of the Sea, emphasises that angling was socially presented as being devoid of any erotic aim. However, the specialised literature of the time suggests otherwise.
Male authors, such as Léon Reymond, used a highly carnal lexicon to describe the excitement associated with the practice, evoking "staggering shivers" and "intimate joys" capable of making the practitioner's heart throb. The primary instrument, often referred to as a "gaule" because of its long and rigid shape, took on an obvious phallic dimension.
Woman, for her part, was judged physiologically unfit. According to Paul Cunisset-Carnot, feminine emotionality and nervousness were incompatible with the patience required by the discipline.
The Polysemy of Vice: From the Fisherwoman to the "Persilleuse"
The French language presents a homonymy heavy with meaning: "pêcheuse" (fisherwoman), the feminine form of the noun "pêcheur," almost merges with the feminine of "pécheur" (sinner), "pécheuse," if the word "pécheresse" did not exist; this polysemy was intentionally exploited by illustrators. The fisherwoman / sinner fishes for the client.
To this is added an argument based on the etymology of slang. A soliciting prostitute was then called a "persilleuse"; yet the word "persilleuse" derives from "persiller," or "pessiller," meaning to hook.
The Representation of the Fisherwoman
The fisherwoman would thus be a solicitor on the banks of the Seine, practicing a sport in which man would be her prey.
The iconographic literature is rich with these alluring women, rod in hand, showing their garters or their backsides as bait to satisfy the sexual appetites of their victims. They thus reel in, at the end of their line, the hearts of smitten men or the bags of cash that go with them.
Contemporary writers, including Guy de Maupassant or Charles de Massas, nonetheless attest that young girls and women of high society could practice this leisure activity on their estates, seeing it as an activity compatible with their delicacy.
![Claude Monet, En Norvégienne [Giverny], 1887](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/92b85e_7bc7a9a3a9c944b88deee4a23a30713f~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_500,h_373,al_c,q_85,enc_avif,quality_auto/92b85e_7bc7a9a3a9c944b88deee4a23a30713f~mv2.png)
Painters like Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, Joseph Caraud, Jean-Louis Forain, or even Ernest Biéler and John Dawson Watson, sublimated elegant women engaging in this summer pastime from boats or shaded banks.
But the lithographs of Honoré Daumier, such as The woman must follow her husband everywhere... or We shall not be leaving then..., mocked the absurdity of the female presence on the fishermen's banks.
If a woman or young girl fished, she would do so quietly, as a companion or shielded from view on her property.
The Manifest Anomaly of A Sunday Afternoon
In light of the manuals of the time, the woman fishing in A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte commits every possible technical error.
Seurat places her in a chaotic and noisy environment, surrounded by gawkers, dogs, boaters, and an incongruous clarinetist, whereas the true devotee of fishing requires silence and calm to avoid scaring away the fish.
Worse still, she handles her line directly under the foliage of a tree, making any cast technically impossible.
The question then arises. Is Seurat's fisherwoman merely one more artifice?
Devoid of even the smallest basket and clearly not using worms, she is perhaps that usurper on the fringes of social morality, a fisher of men—of whom many were known to be at the Island of La Jatte, nicknamed the "Island of Love" for housing a small temple and its statue of Venus.
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