A Fishing Boat in Dieppe Harbour
- Artist: Christopher Wood
- Date: 1929
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 650 x 810 x 19 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
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About this artwork
This is the “A Fishing Boat in Dieppe Harbour” by Christopher Wood, painted in 1929. The scene captures a small fishing vessel anchored at the edge of the Normandy port, a place Wood called a “very good painting place” in a letter to his mother. The composition echoes the naïve, bold style of Alfred Wallis, whom Wood met in St Ives a year earlier. You’ll notice how the boat’s scale dominates the frame, its angle poised like an object on a tabletop, a subtle nod to Wallis’s simple cardboard sketches.
Wood layers the sky and sea with thick, almost sculptural strokes of green, blue, and white, contrasting sharply with the bright yellow wooden boards of the boat and the vividly coloured houses that line the harbour wall. The cliffs and a weather vane appear slightly out of scale, adding a whimsical touch. The artist’s background as a sailor shows in the careful rendering of rigging and nets, worked into wet paint to carve ripple‑like textures.
This oil on canvas, roughly 650 × 810 mm, demonstrates Wood’s ability to fuse naïve simplicity with a complex interplay of colour and line, turning a quiet harbour scene into a lively, almost child‑like composition.
See it in person
A Fishing Boat in Dieppe Harbour is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
