Port of Camaret low tide

Camaret lies near the tip of the Crozon peninsula in Brittany, at the entrance to the roadstead of Brest, and Boudin painted its harbour with the tide right out. Two sailing ships sit on their hulls in the mud beside the quay. Across the water, the reddish tower on the spit is the one built in the 1690s to plans by Vauban, Louis XIV's military engineer, to guard the anchorage, and in 1694 its battery helped turn back an English and Dutch landing. By Boudin's time the port belonged to fishing boats, and a few small figures are out working on the flats in the foreground. The canvas reached Buenos Aires with the collection of the Guerrico family, whose founder Manuel José de Guerrico is often called Argentina's first art collector. Two women of the family gave it to the national museum in 1938.