Venice–Seascape at the Giudecca

Boudin reached Venice on 15 May 1895. He was 71, and he wrote to his brother that he had come to work, not to stroll, and wished he were 20 or 30 years younger. In June he described the city to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, as grey in colouring, soft and misty, with skies full of cloud just like those over Normandy and Holland, the coasts he had painted all his life. This view at the Giudecca gives more than half the canvas to exactly that kind of sky. Below it, boats and a moored ship crowd the waterfront, and a man rows a small boat across the foreground. In the lower right corner he wrote "Venise" above his signature and the year, 95. The picture came to Princeton in 1986, left by an alumnus, Clinton Wilder, the Broadway producer who co-produced the original staging of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?