Village by a River

Eugene Boudin is remembered mostly for one thing he did offstage. Around 1858, in Le Havre, he took a teenaged Monet outdoors and taught him to paint directly from nature, a habit that helped set the whole Impressionist generation loose. This little panel comes a few years later, from about 1867, when Boudin travelled into Brittany and stopped at Le Faou, a village east of Brest. The river you see is really a tidal arm of the sea reaching inland, so at low water the boats settle onto mud. He worked small, in oil on a wood board barely two feet across, and gave most of the picture to the moist Atlantic sky he was famous for reading. Corot had already nicknamed him the king of skies.