A Canal at Abbeville

By 1894 Boudin was 70, had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour two years earlier, and was ill with the cancer that would kill him. He wintered in the south now for his health and kept going back to Venice, and in the seasons between he worked the mouth of the Somme, at Saint-Valery and up the canal that runs inland to Abbeville.

His name had been made on the Normandy coast, on holidaymakers under parasols on the sand at Trouville, painted small and fast while the light held. The method did not change for this one. It is barely 40 centimetres across, done in front of the water.

Four years later, too ill to work, he asked to be taken out of Paris to Deauville so that he could be within sight of the Channel, and he died there in August 1898.