The shore of Portrieux, north coast

In the 1870s Portrieux was a working port on the north coast of Brittany, where small coasting vessels came in on the tide, and Boudin went back to it repeatedly between 1869 and 1875. He painted it at low water, the hulls left sitting on wet sand, the men unloading cargo reduced to a few strokes, though you can still read the effort in how they bend. He is remembered for the holiday crowds of the Normandy resorts, and this is the same coastline doing its ordinary work. The picture crossed the Atlantic in 1906, when Eduardo Schiaffino, the first director of the Buenos Aires museum, bought it in Paris from the gallery run by the Rosenberg brothers.