The Dock of Deauville

Deauville was barely 30 years old when Boudin painted its harbour in 1891. It had been conjured out of empty Normandy marshland in the 1860s as a seaside resort for fashionable Paris, reached by the new railway, and Boudin returned to that stretch of coast again and again. He had grown up nearby in Honfleur and spent his life painting these skies and tidal ports; it was Boudin who first pushed a teenage Monet to paint outdoors, in front of the real weather. Here the interest is the working dock, the moored boats and rigging under a wide, changeable Channel sky. He was 67, with only a few years left to live.