A fishing boat lies beached on a rough shore, its brown sails sagging from the mast and its dark hull wedged among rocks and sand, with ropes trailing across the deck. Beyond it a gray-green sea rolls in under a sky of pale blue streaked with pink. There is no one in sight, and the signature "Gustave Courbet" is painted in red at the lower left. Gustave Courbet made it in 1865 at Trouville, on the Normandy coast, where the Metropolitan Museum says he spent an intensely productive visit with the American painter James McNeill Whistler between September and November.

Small beach scenes at resorts like Trouville were popular with painters of the time. The Met notes that, unlike many marine pictures of the period, the boat itself is the focus of the composition. The Fishing Boat was the first work by Courbet to enter the Met's collection, in 1899, as a gift of Mary Goldenberg. It is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.