Fisherfolk feature in Stern’s painting throughout her career, the fishing industry being of great economic importance not only in her hometown of Cape Town, but also in some of her favourite working destinations, such as Madeira, Zanzibar and the fishing ports of the Mediterranean. In 1950, she embarked on a tour of Europe that included visits to Madeira, Lisbon, Madrid, Monaco, Venice, Geneva, Paris and London, and made many sketches of fishermen in Madeira and the south of France during that trip. However, in 1951, the year Woman with Fish was painted, Stern appears to have stayed in South Africa, and while she did travel to Natal that year, the subject is almost certainly Capetonian.

While fish feature in Stern’s still lives from 1920, if not earlier, Woman with Fish is a superlative example of her depictions of fishermen and agricultural labourers that dominate her later period, from 1950 until her death in 1966. These had been favourite subjects for Pechstein and Die Brücke group too, who saw rural European peasants and fishermen as ‘primitive’ in contrast to urban educated citizens, and responded with idealised and romanticised images, often described as ‘domestic primitivism’. While much has been written about Stern’s obsessive search for the ‘other’, there is an obvious humanity to this work that betrays that notion and marks a significant departure from her portraits of the 1920s and 30s. The woman’s monumental form – descriptive of the very physical nature of her manual labour - fills the frame to the point of bursting - a device Stern used time and again in 1951, as seen in works such as Strawberry Pickers and in several etchings and monotypes in the collection of the Irma Stern Trust.

The Cape Malay fishermen and women mainly lived in the multicultural inner-city neighborhood of District Six, within sight of the docks. In 1950, the National Party passed the Group Areas Act which designated specific areas for particular race groups. In 1966, the Minister of Coloured Affairs (and later Prime Minister) P.W. Botha announced that District Six would be redeveloped for White occupation, resulting in the forced removal of over 60,000 of its Coloured inhabitants to the Cape Flats over 25km away. While Stern was not outspoken on her political views, acutely aware of her public profile and preferring not to upset her powerful patrons, she would have recognised their plight. She herself had spent most of her life displaced, as a young child by the Boer War and by the two World Wars that followed and must have experienced both sympathy and regret. The whole neighbourhood was bulldozed after her death and suddenly District Six, which had been such a rich source of inspiration for the artist, from the Malay flower sellers in the early 1920s to the fisherwoman in the 1950s, ceased to be.