Au pays de la mer. Douleur

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Charles Cottet
Au pays de la mer. Douleur
entre 1908 et 1909
huile sur toile
H. 264,0 ; L. 345,0 cm.
Achat à Charles Cottet, 1912
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
Charles Cottet
Au pays de la mer. Douleur
entre 1908 et 1909
huile sur toile
H. 264,0 ; L. 345,0 cm.
Achat à Charles Cottet, 1912
© droits réservés
Charles Cottet (1863 - 1925)

Bought by the State at the Salon des Boursiers de Voyage in 1912, this large painting called either In the Land of the Sea, Grief or The Victims of the Sea, is one of the many variations that Cottet painted to illustrate the harsh life of mariners and their families. In a powerfully geometrical composition, he transformed the return of the body of a drowned man to the port of the Ile of Sein into a universal event. It shows the eternal renewal of the death of Christ, with four grieving women in timeless dark costumes, substitutes for the Virgin and the holy women.
The religious reference does not stop at the allusion to the Gospels. The frieze arrangement of the figures also refers to wooden or stone sculptures from the Gothic period, which was a time of intense religious fervour. Although ostentatious emotion and grief distinguish the women in the centre, resignation seems to prevail among the crowd gathered around them while the background of overlapping facets of luminous colour, evokes an eternity which is greater than man's inevitably brief passage on earth.

Niveau médian, Salle 58
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