Seascape at Sunset

Boudin spent his life painting the sea and, above all, the sky over it. He worked outdoors on the Normandy coast when that was still an unusual thing to do, and the older painter Corot nicknamed him the king of skies. He has one more claim on our attention. Years earlier it was Boudin who coaxed a teenaged Monet out onto the beach to paint directly from nature, nudging him toward the path the Impressionists would take. This late seascape shows what he did best, a low horizon that hands most of the canvas to air and cloud, the sun sinking over open water and its light spread thin across the sky. He went on painting skies like this almost to the end, dying in 1898.