Washerwomen near a Bridge

In February 1883 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel opened a new gallery on the boulevard de la Madeleine in Paris and hung about 150 works by Boudin in it. It was Boudin's first one-man show in the city. He was 59 by then, and had spent decades on the Normandy coast painting beaches, skies and the visitors who came for the sea air. This small oil panel is from that same year, and its subject is labour. Women bend over their washing at the edge of the water, and the clean linen piled in their baskets is the brightest thing in the picture. Behind them, figures and horse-drawn carriages cross the bridge in quicker, sketchier strokes. Durand-Ruel's stock books pick the panel up in 1886 and send it to his New York branch two years later. It reached Boston in 1923, in the bequest of a collector who left the museum 40 paintings his wife had gathered.