Camaret Harbor

When Boudin painted the fishing harbor at Camaret around 1871, France was coming apart behind him. The war with Prussia had ended in defeat and Paris had just gone through the Commune. Boudin had sat out the worst of it away from the capital, and he spent these years working the far coast of Brittany, returning to Camaret each summer from 1870 to 1873. What drew him was ordinary: a small Breton port that lived on sardines and lobster, its sailing boats riding a grey, changeable light off the Atlantic. He gave most of the canvas to the sky and its weather, which is what he cared about most; the older painter Corot called him the king of skies. It's the same shifting outdoor light he'd urged a teenage Monet to leave the studio and chase, a few years before, on the beaches near Le Havre.