Boats in Le Havre

Boudin signed this little panel at the lower right and added the year, 87. By then he had been painting the docks of Le Havre, the port where he grew up, for decades. This time he turned the wooden panel upright, about 35 centimetres tall and 26 wide, which gives the masts and hanging sails of the big ship room to rise into a heaped-up sky.

It left France fairly soon. A Paris dealer had it by 1902, and in 1905 the Vose gallery in Boston sold it to Frank Peabody, a partner in the Boston brokerage firm Kidder, Peabody. When he died in 1918 it went to his daughter Amelia, a sculptor who had trained at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1937 she gave the panel to that same museum, which still owns it.