Fishing

Fishing is the activity of trying to catch fish. Fishing sometimes takes place in the wild. Techniques for catching fish include hand gathering, spearing, netting, angling and trapping.

The term fishing may be applied to catching other aquatic animals such as molluscs, cephalopods, crustaceans, and echinoderms. The term is not normally applied to catching farmed fish, or to aquatic mammals, such as whales, where the term whaling is more appropriate.

According to FAO statistics, the total number of commercial fishermen and fish farmers is estimated to be 38 million. Fisheries and aquaculture provide direct and indirect employment to over 500 million people in developing countries. In 2005, the worldwide per capita consumption of fish captured from wild fisheries was 14.4 kilograms, with an additional 7.4 kilograms harvested from fish farms. In addition to providing food, modern fishing is also a recreational pastime.

History

Fishing is an ancient practice that dates back to at least the beginning of the Paleolithic period about 40,000 years ago. Isotopic analysis of the skeletal remains of Tianyuan man, a 40,000-year-old modern human from eastern Asia, has shown that he regularly consumed freshwater fish.Archaeology features such as shell middens, discarded fish bones, and cave paintings show that sea foods were important for survival and consumed in significant quantities.

Fishing (Carracci)

Fishing (or Fishing Scene) is a painting by Italian artist Annibale Carracci, painted before 1595 and given to Louis XIV by Prince Camillo Pamphili in 1665. It is currently held and exhibited at the Louvre in Paris.

History

The painting and its companion, Hunting, were included in Charles Le Brun's inventory in 1683, and in November 1695 they were in the apartments of King Louis XIV's younger brother. It was no doubt for this purpose that they were given two sumptuous gilt frames, each with attributes suited to the subject of the painting - among the finest examples of the art of frame-making in the time of Louis XIV. In 1955, when the varnish was being cleaned, the 19th century gilding covering the original gilding was removed - a task of some magnitude which was carried out by the French firm of Lebrun.

This work, together with its companion, date from Carracci's Bolognese period, before he left for Rome in 1595 to paint at the Galleria Farnese. At this time he was extremely interested in landscape, and his experiments are a foreshadowing of Poussin's classical compositions; but in these pictures he is exploring in a different direction, in the tradition of the Bassani, a family of painters whose studios continued to turn out landscapes which were prized all over Europe. His interest was the countryside. Without any religious theme as pretext, he painted two pure landscapes whose true subjects are the forest and the river, motivated by the themes of hunting and fishing. Therefore Carracci was able to show nature animated with the life of the aristocracy and of ordinary people. The composition follows the visual device of division into compartments.

Fishing (disambiguation)

Fishing is the activity of trying to catch wild fish.

Fishing may also refer to: