Fisher Boats at Honfleur

In the mid-1860s the little Normandy port of Honfleur was where a painter learned to work fast, outdoors, with the tide and the light on the move. Monet was in his mid-twenties when he painted these fishing boats drawn up on the water, and he was not yet the Impressionist we think of. He came here to be near two older men he trusted: Eugene Boudin, who had first pushed him out of the studio and onto the beach, and the Dutchman Johan Jongkind, whose loose handling of sky and water, he later said, opened his eyes. Much of the group met at the Saint-Simeon farm on the hill above the harbour, half inn and half open-air school. In the modern catalogue of his work this canvas is among the earliest, number 74, a coastal study painted years before the word impression attached itself to his name.