Boats Returning to Port, Trouville

A squall is blowing in off the Channel, and every boat on the water is making for the same gap in the Trouville jetty. Boudin painted this in 1894, near the end of a long life spent mostly on this stretch of the Normandy coast. He rarely painted boats out on the open sea. What held him was the harbour, the tide, and the wide changing sky above it, the thing that earned him the nickname king of the skies. Trouville had become a fashionable seaside resort by then, and the same water that brings these fishing boats home carried holiday crowds out for the summer. Among the returning sails you can pick out a steamer, its smoke trailing flat in the wind, running from the same weather as the rest.