Washerwomen by the River

Eugène Boudin is often remembered for one thing he said to a teenager. In the 1850s, in a shop in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, he told a young Claude Monet to stop drawing caricatures and come paint outdoors, in front of the real sky and water, advice that helped set Impressionism in motion. Boudin himself painted that coast his whole life, its huge skies and its fashionable beach crowds. This is the quieter side of his work, made around 1880: women kneeling to wash laundry at the edge of a river, the kind of ordinary labour that filled the waterways he loved. It is a small panel, worked quickly and loosely, the sky given as much room as the land. The women bend to the water in the flat light of the day.