Boats at Anchor and Beachhead

1871 was a grim year to be French. The country had just lost a war to Prussia, and Paris had risen in the Commune and then been crushed. Boudin himself had sat the fighting out abroad, in Antwerp, while his younger friend Monet waited in London. This small canvas belongs to the return to ordinary life afterward: fishing boats resting along a beach beneath a wide, shifting sky. That sky is the real subject. Boudin studied weather and cloud so intently that the older painter Corot nicknamed him the king of skies. For the rest of his life he kept working outdoors on the Normandy coast, chasing exactly this kind of light and weather.