View of the Sea at Sunset

In his review of the Salon of 1859, the poet Charles Baudelaire described the pastel studies of sea and sky he had seen in the studio of Eugène Boudin. Each one, he noted, had the date, the hour and the wind written in the margin, and all those clouds went to his head like a strong drink. Boudin was the painter from Le Havre whom Monet had known since his teens. Around 1862, in his early twenties, Monet made this one himself, on a strip of paper 40 centimetres wide and only 15 tall. Most of it is sky, a long band of yellow cloud across a mauve-grey ground, with grey-blue sea below. He signed it at the lower right and kept it for nearly 30 years. In August 1891 he sold it to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, and in 1907 the Boston collector William Payne Blake bought it. It came to the museum in 1922 with his bequest, made in memory of his sister.