The River Touques at Saint-Arnoult

In March 1895 Boudin, then 70 and already ill, wrote to a painter friend that the work was getting harder, especially since he had been trying to finish his studies out of doors. He kept going back all the same to this bend in the River Touques at Saint-Arnoult, a village in the low, flood-prone meadows just inland from Trouville and Deauville. He painted exactly this view once in 1891, three times in 1893 and twice in 1895, always with the tall trees on the left and the grassy bank on the right, and only the sky changing. Here it is mild and blue, and the wind shows in the drift of chimney smoke and the line of birds over the meadow, where a few cows graze at the water's edge. In January 1895 the dealers Allard and Noël paid him 700 francs for a canvas of this subject and roughly this size. Boudin sometimes dated a picture when he sold it, so this one may have been painted the summer before.