Cows on the meadow

Boudin spent his working life on the Normandy coast painting sky and water, and alongside the beach scenes he kept a quieter subject going for decades, cattle. He would set up on the bank of the Touques, the river that runs down to Deauville, and work the animals from life on panels as small as this one, 17 centimetres high. One cow at the front is given a definite shape and the rest of the herd loosens into spots and strokes, which is the whole exercise, watching form come apart with distance. The panel reached Ghent in 1913 with the bequest of Fernand Scribe, a local collector who left the museum his collection of 19th-century painting.