Portrieux, the port

Boudin painted this harbour in 1874 and wrote the place and the year beside his signature at lower left, Portrieux, 74. The port sits on the Bay of Saint-Brieuc in northern Brittany, and its shelter then was still a stone mole built in the early 1820s. Storms had been damaging it ever since, and one in 1870 tore two breaches in the wall. An imperial decree to rebuild it had been signed in 1869, but the work only began in 1876, so what you see is the old harbour a couple of years before the builders arrived. It was a working port. An engineer's report of 1852 counted ten ships fitted out here for the cod banks off Newfoundland, and local boats traded cattle, wheat and oats with the Channel Islands. The canvas later passed through dealers and collectors in Paris, London, Toronto, Buffalo and New York.