A Street in Dordrecht

Boudin turned 60 in the summer of 1884, and he spent that summer in Holland, on the Meuse at Dordrecht. He wrote home on 25 June that the country was very picturesque and the river superb, and the river was what he had come for. He was a painter of skies and water, the man who had talked the teenage Monet into working outdoors. Dordrecht also gave him this, away from the water, a narrow street with a flag hung out across it and people going about an ordinary afternoon. It is painted on a wooden panel, 41 by 33 centimetres, the kind he carried in a stack with a folding easel so he could stop anywhere and work from what was in front of him. It reached Glasgow in 1944 in the bequest of the shipowner William McInnes.