The net that holds the gaze

We come looking for Lake Geneva and encounter a net. In Nets and Fishermen, painted around 1877, François Bocion places the mesh between the landscape and us. The mountains are still there, and so is the lake, but their presence reaches us through something fragile, useful and almost transparent. In front of this curtain, a young man lies resting. This vertical work thus offers a different encounter with the painter of Lake Geneva: the water can wait a little, for the shore has its own time.

The painting belongs to a group of scenes devoted to fishermen, a subject Bocion worked on regularly from the 1860s. The MCBA holds this oil on canvas, measuring sixty-one by fifty centimetres and acquired in 1913. Its entry compares it with variants in Geneva, Winterthur and Vevey. These comparisons point towards a location on the French shore of the lake, probably around Tourronde. We must keep that final word: the painting does not carry a sign identifying its exact location.

Looking at the work — The institutional reproduction shows a young fisherman lying in the foreground, a massive tree on the right and foliage covering the scene. The stretched net occupies a large part of the background without making it opaque. Smaller figures appear behind the sleeper. The ground receives light touches between broad grey and green areas. Our gaze can pass through the mesh, but the shade and framing constantly bring us back to this inhabited stretch of shore.

The equipment opens up a very concrete story. Nineteenth-century nets are still made from natural fibres; fishermen spread them out to dry and to find tears. The museum points out a man repairing them with a netting shuttle in his hand. This detail alone changes how we look. The great hanging sheets are not decorative sails arranged for the painter. They belong to work partly carried out away from the water, once the boat has returned.

Rest then takes on a particular value. Without inventing what the young man has just experienced, we can see that his reclining body contrasts with the figures continuing their activity behind him. The painting gathers several rhythms on a single surface. Here, almost complete stillness; further away, a task requiring gestures; around them, reflections and foliage. The painting accommodates these differences without turning them into a heroic narrative. A shore's time is not only the time of departure or of catching fish.

Bocion had learnt his craft in Paris, notably in Charles Gleyre's studio, then developed it from Lausanne. The Musée Jenisch emphasises his attention to changes in light and atmosphere. Nets and Fishermen lets us appreciate their significance at close range. The sun does not illuminate everything at once; it arrives in fragments. The canvas preserves the unity of a bright day while placing us beneath the trees. The landscape is therefore discovered from within a shelter, together with the work and rest taking place there.

What might seem an obstacle becomes the very principle of the image. The mesh allows light to circulate, holds back some forms and creates intervals. It suggests a way of seeing that does not clearly separate people from their environment. The tool belongs to the fisherman, but in the painting it also occupies the lake and sky. Painting turns this overlap into an experience of looking: we distinguish some things better by accepting that they are not entirely exposed or presented in an uninterrupted panorama.

The title announces objects and an occupation; our memory of the work chiefly retains a feeling of coolness beneath the trees. This does not mean forgetting the workers. Their presence is precisely what makes this shade special, because it shelters bodies, equipment and ordinary gestures. When we return to the sleeper, the net behind him no longer seems to conceal the real subject. It connects the different planes. Bocion's Lake Geneva has shifted towards this pause beside the water, where the landscape, too, is repaired mesh by mesh.