Eugène Isabey

Isabey traveled with the painter Johan Barthold Jongkind to Brittany on several excursions in 1847, 1850, and 1851. He visited Morlaix, Brest, Landerneau, Vitré, and Saint-Malo, making drawings of the landscape and streets in watercolor and gouache on brown paper. The old quarters of these historic towns appealed to him, and he would situate contemporary history subjects before the medieval streetscapes of Brittany's villages in his paintings.
This sheet belongs to a group of works depicting the streets and quays of Morlaix. The town preserves many sixteenth-century timber and stone houses, and these rustic edifices along narrow cobbled streets attracted Isabey's attention. A second signed watercolor of a street in Morlaix is in the Louvre (MI 953).