Mist, Bordeaux

Boudin painted this around 1875, during the years his family lived in Bordeaux, a busy river port he never much warmed to. What he did love was weather, and here he gives almost the whole small panel to it: a soft grey haze over the estuary, the masts and quays of the harbour dissolving into it, a little pink working into the cloud. This was the thing he did better than almost anyone. The older painter Corot called him the king of the skies, and years before, on the Normandy coast, it was Boudin who talked a teenaged Claude Monet into leaving the studio to paint the open air directly from nature. The first Impressionist show had opened in Paris only the year before, in 1874, with Boudin among the exhibitors, and this damp little panel is exactly the kind of quick outdoor study that put him there.