Le Croisic - Vue générale prise de Pembron

Eugene Boudin painted this view of Le Croisic, on the Atlantic coast at the edge of Brittany, in 1897, the year before he died. He was 73 and unwell, still working in the open air as he always had, catching the flat estuary light from the Pen-Bron spit across the water. Boudin spent his life on skies and coastlines like this one, and he did one thing that outlasted every canvas he made. On the beaches near Le Havre in the 1850s he found a teenage caricaturist named Claude Monet and kept pushing him to set down the pencil and paint the sea directly, outdoors. Monet said afterwards that he owed everything to that nudge. It is fitting the picture hangs in Le Havre, at the Andre Malraux museum, a short walk from the shore where Boudin first set him to work.