Pasture at Fervaques

In the spring of 1874, a group of young painters hung their canvases in the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar. A reviewer sneered at one Monet called Impression, Sunrise, and that mocking word gave Impressionism its name. Boudin was in that room too, with 13 pictures. He was the older painter who had taught the young Monet to work outdoors and follow the light as it shifted. That same year, away from the Channel beaches he was known for, he set up inland at Fervaques, a small cattle village in the Pays d'Auge of Normandy. Here cows graze under a wide, pale sky, painted quickly in oil on a canvas barely 38 by 55 centimetres. A critic writing years later called it a luminous impression that never grew past a sketch. It is one of about 20 oils Boudin made in that single village.