The Town Hall and the Francois I Tower, Le Havre

When Boudin signed and dated this small panel in 1852, the round stone tower on the right was already more than 330 years old. The Tour François Ier had been built between 1517 and 1520, as Le Havre itself was being founded on the orders of King Francis I, to guard the mouth of the harbour. By Boudin's day it served as a signal station, with a semaphore and a tide gauge that told incoming ships how deep the water was. It had less than a decade left. In 1861 the city decided to pull it down to widen the port entrance for larger steamships, and the walls proved so solid that engineers had to use explosives. Boudin, then in his late twenties and still years away from his beach scenes, set down the quayside plainly, from the town hall on the left to a plume of dark smoke drifting across the sky. The panel is only 16 by 38 centimetres, and it came to the city's museum in 1893, given by a collector named Ferdinand Martin.