The jetty and lighthouse at Honfleur

This panel is barely bigger than a sheet of writing paper, about 19 by 24 centimetres, the small wooden format Boudin favoured for working quickly outdoors. By the late 1880s he was in his sixties and had spent decades on exactly this kind of motif: harbours, weather, and the small dark figures of people out for a walk. Here they crowd the planks of a jetty beneath a tall lighthouse, while a heavy grey sky fills most of the picture. The title places the scene at Honfleur, the painter's home town. An old label on the back names somewhere else, Le Havre, the bigger port across the Seine estuary, and calls the view its jetty and outer harbour. Another label reads, in French, “guaranteed Boudin, 1890”. The painting came to the Fitzwilliam in 1967, a gift from the architect Vincent Harris in memory of his wife Edith.