Adieu! by Alfred Guillou: A Last Kiss in the Shipwreck (1892)
A wooden boat has capsized in a raging sea. Its hull lies on its side, half under water, with the name of its home port, Concarneau, painted on the stern. Clinging to the wreck, a bearded fisherman holds a boy in his arms, most probably his son. The boy's head falls back, his eyes are closed, his bare arm hangs over his father's shoulder, and the man presses a last kiss on his face as the waves break over them. This is Adieu!, painted in 1892 by the Breton artist Alfred Guillou: not a farewell on the quay, but a last kiss in the middle of a shipwreck.
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Artist: Alfred Guillou (1844–1926)
Date: 1892
Medium: Oil on canvas, 170 × 245 cm
Collection: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, Brittany, France
Notable fact: The capsized boat bears the name of Concarneau, the painter's home town
What does the painting show?
The sea fills the whole canvas. Behind the two figures, a wall of green water curls over, streaked with foam; on the right, a dark rock breaks the surface. There is no horizon, no sky to speak of and no shore, only waves on every side. On the left, the broken mast and the tangled rigging of the boat float loose in the swell. The upturned hull, its planks black with water, is the only solid thing left to hold on to.
The fisherman wears the heavy knitted jersey of the Breton coast. With one arm he grips the boy's body, with the other he holds the child's arm across his shoulder, and he bends his head to kiss him. The boy does not respond. His face is pale, his eyes closed, his shirt torn away from his shoulders, and the lower part of his body is already under the sea. Everything suggests that the son has not survived, and that the father knows it. The title, Adieu!, is the word he cannot say aloud.
Guillou paints the water with great energy, in fast strokes of turquoise, green and white, and contrasts it with the smooth, pale skin of the boy at the centre. The composition is tight and close: we are in the water with them, a few metres away, with nothing to stand on.
Brittany and the sea
Alfred Guillou was born in Concarneau in 1844, the son of a fisherman-farmer who became mayor of the town. He trained in Paris in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel, the painter of The Birth of Venus, where he became friends with Jules Bastien-Lepage and Théophile Deyrolle. In 1871 he went home with Deyrolle, who married his sister, and together they founded the Concarneau art colony, which drew painters from all over Europe and America, among them the Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer and the American Cecilia Beaux.
Guillou spent his life painting the people of the Breton coast: fishermen, sardine girls, religious processions and the dangers of the sea. For a fishing community, drowning was not a romantic fantasy but a constant reality, and many families in Concarneau lost fathers and sons to the Atlantic. Adieu! turns that reality into a melodrama on the scale of the Paris Salon, where Guillou exhibited regularly from 1868. He won silver medals at the Universal Exhibitions of 1889 and 1900 and later served on the board of the museum in Quimper.
Other shipwrecks, other farewells
The sea as a scene of tragedy runs through nineteenth-century painting, from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa to the quiet grief of Bárbara y Balza's Shipwrecked, painted four years after Guillou's picture. Poynter's The Cave of the Storm Nymphs shows the same kind of wreck from the other side, through the eyes of the sea creatures who profit from it.
Where can you see it?
The painting belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, in the heart of Brittany, whose collection of Breton-inspired painting is one of the richest in France. Concarneau, with its walled old town on an island in the harbour, is a short drive away.
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Sources
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, "Alfred Guillou, Adieu!"; Unidivers, "Alfred Guillou, le peintre qui capturait l'essence de sa Bretagne natale"; The Eclectic Light Company, "Coast: The drowned man"; Wikipedia, "Alfred Guillou".
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