Throughout his career as a painter, Edward Cooke travelled extensively in Europe, visiting France, Holland, Italy, Spain, North Africa and Scandinavia. Paintings and drawings resulted from all his travels, but it is evident that the places that provided the strongest fascination for him besides the southern coastline of England were the beaches and estuaries of Holland and the topography of Venice and Italy.

This drawing is unusual in Cooke’s work, in showing a group figure composition. It is an acutely observed sketch of fish wives and a fisherman at the fish market in Boulogne. The fishwives bargaining with the fishermen provide a concentrated human interest that Cooke usually avoided, though other drawings by him show an interest with ordinary life and the lower classes. The attention to costume, however, for example the clogs, bonnet and skirts worn by the central standing woman, recalls Cooke’s early drawings that obsessively recorded the objects and paraphernalia associated with shipping and coastal life.