St. Catherine's Market in Honfleur

The market Boudin painted here sits in a square Honfleur had to rebuild from nothing. Its stone church was wrecked during the Hundred Years' War, and when the English finally left in the middle of the 15th century the town needed what money it had for its fortifications, so the local shipwrights put up a replacement in wood, roofed like two upturned hulls. They stood the bell tower separately, across the square, to keep lightning away from all that timber. The ground between them became the market place. Boudin painted it again and again from the 1860s onwards, and this version, on a panel about 32 centimetres tall, dates from 1890. The wooden belfry still stands where the shipwrights left it, apart from the church on the far side of the square.