Seascape, River Pilots

Two open rowing boats are pulling through a choppy grey sea, each with a crew bent over the oars. Ahead of them, square-rigged sailing ships are under way beneath heavy, broken cloud. The title explains the errand. Before a sailing ship could get into a river mouth or a tidal harbour on the Channel coast, a local pilot had to climb aboard and take her in past the sandbanks, and those pilots went out to meet the ships in boats like these. French had an old word for such a man, lamaneur, and Boudin painted the subject more than once, giving one of those canvases exactly that title. The museum's record gives this version no date. It is a fair size for him, about 50 by 74 centimetres, and it came to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1995 in the bequest of Henry Saltonstall Howe of Canton, Massachusetts.