The Fortifications at Antibes, France

Eugène Boudin spent his life painting the grey, changeable skies of the English Channel around Honfleur and Le Havre. He was the painter who, decades earlier, had coaxed a teenaged Monet out of the studio and into the open air, and Corot admiringly called him the king of skies. By 1893, when he made this, Boudin was almost 70 and unwell, and like a number of ailing artists of his generation he was wintering in the south for his lungs. What he found on the Côte d'Azur was the opposite of home: instead of soft Channel haze, the hard clear light of the Mediterranean falling on the old stone fortifications of Antibes, the ramparts that had guarded this border town for centuries. He kept going back to the coast he came from. Five years after this, Boudin died at Deauville, on the Channel coast he had painted all his life.