Harbor at Honfleur

By 1865 the estuary around Honfleur, where the Seine finally reaches the sea, was quietly becoming the place where French landscape painting loosened up. Boudin worked here in the open air, on paper light enough to carry down to the quay, and often finished while the light held. He signed this small harbour view in the lower right, "E. Boudin 65," and wrote the place, Honfleur, in the far corner. The sky takes the upper half of the picture and sets the weather for the boats and water beneath it. Boudin filled whole notebooks with clouds alone, each one dated by the hour. A few summers before this, on this same stretch of coast, he had pushed a teenaged Claude Monet to set up an easel outdoors and paint what was actually in front of him.