Honfleur, Hafendamm

Boudin grew up in Honfleur, the son of a harbour pilot, so the jetties and grey Channel light of this Normandy port were the first things he ever knew. He painted this around 1850, right at the start. He was 26, and had just given up the little framing and stationery shop he ran in nearby Le Havre to try to live as a painter. The gamble paid off enough that the town awarded him a scholarship to study in Paris the next year. He would spend the rest of his life on this coast, painting its harbours, beaches and enormous skies. A decade or so on, working outdoors near here, he would push a local teenager named Claude Monet to paint from nature.