Bordeaux, the Harbor

Boudin painted this in 1874, the year a group of younger artists held their first independent exhibition in Paris and earned the name Impressionists. Boudin, older than most of them, sent work to that show as well. He had been living in Bordeaux since the year before, and here he painted its working harbor, the masts and hulls crowded along the river Garonne beneath a wide, changeable sky. That sky takes up more than half the picture, all soft grays and pinks of an overcast day on the water. It was skies like this that led the painter Corot, a generation older, to call him the king of skies.