Bordeaux, Boats on the Garonne

In April 1876 the Impressionists opened their second group show in Paris, in Durand-Ruel's rooms on the rue Le Peletier. Boudin, who had hung his work in the first one two years earlier, was not in it. He was down on the Atlantic coast, working the quays at Bordeaux, as he had been doing on and off through the 1870s. Bordeaux was France's great wine and colonial port, and the Garonne there is tidal, so the water climbs and drops several metres against the quay walls twice a day and the moored boats go with it. Boudin had made his name on the fashionable beaches at Trouville, painting crinolines on the sand. Working harbours took up more and more of him as he got older, and he was 52 the year he painted this one.