Nahe Quimper

In 1857 Boudin was 33 and nobody's idea of a coming man. He had given up the framing and stationery shop he kept in Le Havre, spent a scholarship from the town council on three years of study in Paris, and was now working in Brittany, looking for a subject large enough for the Salon. This panel comes out of that search. Quimper sits in the far west of the region, and what he found around it was farm country, market roads and the pilgrimages held there every summer, a long way from the beaches that later made his name. Those pilgrimages gave him the subject he needed. When the Salon finally took him, in 1859, it was with a Breton crowd scene, the Pardon of Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, painted from this same ground. The panel entered the Manchester collection in 1995.