Views of the Port de la Lune had been a highly popular motif with painters from Bordeaux and abroad since the 17th century. Pierre Lacour, both a painter and the museum’s first curator, captured his vision of Bordeaux with this urban landscape painted between 1804 and 1806.
He opted for a view of the facades of the Chartrons and Bacalan docks. On the left, you can make out Hôtel Fenwick, the oldest United States consulate in France, today next to the CAPC, Museum of Contemporary Art. As you might have noticed, the painter has focused on the tiniest details and depicts all the different activities in this bustling neighbourhood. It’s late in the day and carters with wagons filled with stones, carriages and cabriolets are all hurrying to get back home.
Some ship carpenters are cleaning the hulls of their rowing boats and in the background a porter is unloading a cargo of stave wood to make wine barrels. Further on, a carter is whipping his horse to make it pull the heavy load of stones, whilst in the distance, casks are being rolled out of a flat-bottomed boat along the ground, then hoisted with ropes into the warehouses.
In this painting, Lacour pays tribute to the various socio-professional categories responsible for the city’s economic prosperity: traders, artisans, merchants and boatmen. Moreover, an impressive fleet of rowing boats and skiffs are navigating around the big sailing ships that have come here to trade. And on a more amusing note, we can see Lacour himself in the foreground on the left with his daughter who is holding a parasol.
