Ulysse Butin

Ulysse Butin made his name painting the fishing people of Villerville, a village on the Normandy coast, and his Burial of a Sailor at Villerville, from 1878, is also in the Musée d'Orsay. Here his friend Duez shows him at work on a grassy clifftop, in a beret and dark jersey, palette and a fistful of brushes in one hand, a plaid rug draped at his side. The canvas on the easel is turned away from us, so we see only its back and the sea he is looking at, grey water breaking below a low far headland. White wild flowers grow around the legs of the easel. Duez sent the portrait to the Salon of 1880. Butin died three years later, at 45, and the state bought the picture from Duez's widow in 1896, a few months after Duez's own death.