Antwerp: View of the Port from the Tête de Flandres

The ground Boudin stood on to paint this was not yet part of Antwerp. The Tête de Flandres, Vlaams Hoofd in Flemish, was the low bank on the far side of the Scheldt, opposite the old city, a small settlement with a fort guarding the ferry landing. It belonged to the neighbouring village of Zwijndrecht and was joined to Antwerp only in 1923. From there he looked back across the river in 1871. The city is a thin grey strip on the right with a church tower rising out of it, and the masts of the port are strung out along the water. In front sit a wooden landing stage and a broad red-brown hull with a flag at its mast. He painted it on a wooden panel. In 1940 the New York collector Grenville Winthrop, a Harvard graduate, bought it, and two years later he gave it to Harvard's Fogg Museum.