Port Scene

This little panel, about 15 centimetres by 21, smaller than a sheet of writing paper, has a short and unusually close history. Its first known owner was Gustave Cahen, Boudin's friend and an executor of his estate after he died in 1898. Cahen had begun gathering material for a life of the painter during Boudin's last years, and in 1900 he published it in Paris as Eugène Boudin, His Life and His Work, one of the first books devoted to him. Cahen also kept a collection of Boudin's pictures, and this was part of it. His heirs held on to it until 1937, when they sold it to the dealers Jacques Seligmann and Company. That December the Boston collector John Taylor Spaulding bought it in New York, and it came to the Museum of Fine Arts with his bequest in 1948. The museum dates the panel to about 1880. A low shore with houses runs in from the left, and a sailing boat and two tall square-riggers stand out on flat, pale water.