In the first of these two articles I showed paintings of fish in myth and other narrative, and had reached examples of fish for sale when it had been landed on the beach.

When Anders Zorn was making the transition from watercolour to oil painting, he travelled to the fishing village of Newlyn, near Penzance in Cornwall, where there was an artist’s colony. When there in 1888 he visited the fishing port of Saint Ives, where he painted this Fish Market in Saint Ives.

Although Joaquín Sorolla had been brought up in Valencia and painted its fishing industry and beaches extensively, remarkably few of his paintings show fish.

In 1919, when he was painting his series of views of Spain for the Hispanic Society of America, those included the tuna market in Ayamonte, Tuna Fishing.

Fish have also appeared in more unusual settings.

Kazimierz Sichulski’s Fish (1908) is a startlingly original pastel painting, a virtuoso combination of reflections from and views through this water surface, to the fish beneath.

George Dunlop Leslie’s undated Goldfish Seller shows a hawker trying to sell goldfish to an upper middle class Victorian family. He may have arrived in the horse-drawn cart glimpsed outside the gate, and wears a bowler hat typical of itinerant traders, with a long green smock. The daughter and young son appear particularly unimpressed.

Lovis Corinth’s Woman with a Fishtank from 1911 shows the artist’s wife Charlotte in their flat on Klopstockstraße in Berlin. The aquarium, full of goldfish, is surrounded by quite a jungle of indoor plants, her little corner of vegetation within their city flat.

Painted in a combination of transparent watercolour and gouache, Walter Crane’s undated Diver is an unusual and challenging motif.

Finally, fish have been popular objects included in still life paintings, in what has become termed fruits de mer, the fruit of the sea.

Clara Peeters’ Still Life of Fish and a Candlestick is one of the earliest and most accomplished such paintings. She painted this in 1611, when she was in Amsterdam.

Among the first of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s successful still lifes is The Ray from 1727, exhibited the following year to secure his place in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. This is an extraordinary combination of objects, dominated by the ghostly ‘face’ of the hanging fish, ably supported by the anger of the cat.

After Chardin’s death in 1779, his successor Anne Vallayer-Coster reached her zenith, in brilliant displays such as A Still Life of Mackerel, Glassware, a Loaf of Bread and Lemons on a Table with a White Cloth from 1787. Although reminiscent of Clara Peeters’ fish, these lack the open-mouthed gawp.

The one artist who probably painted more fish than any other was William Merritt Chase, who characteristically dashed off a fish still life to warm up his brushes each day when he was teaching.

After completing his studies in Munich, Chase spent several months in Venice, where he painted one of his best-known still lifes, The Yield of the Waters, also known as A Fishmarket in Venice, (1878). This was probably his most complex and detailed still life, showing a wide variety of the fish and seafood available in the Mediterranean. It also established his own specialist sub-genre of still life: fish, characteristically set against a dark background.