A Dutch Windmill

By 1884 the painters Eugène Boudin had encouraged as a young man on the Normandy coast were the talk of Paris, and he kept doing what he had always done best. He crossed again into the Netherlands, where the flat land and the water give a sky room to fill most of the canvas. A windmill stands here mainly as a measure of that sky, a dark upright against moving cloud and the light reflected off the water. Boudin had spent decades painting the coast at Honfleur and Trouville, and the older painter Corot once called him the king of skies. He was one of the first Frenchmen to set up an easel outdoors and paint the weather as he found it, and it was he who had pushed the young Monet to work the same way. That shifting sky is really the subject here.