The story
In a former convent chapel in Honfleur, the Normandy harbour town, the walls are hung with the sea and sky of the coast just outside. More than a hundred works by Eugène Boudin, the Honfleur-born painter of beaches and harbours, are here, oils alongside pastels and drawings. Boudin was also the man who persuaded a teenage Claude Monet to paint out of doors, and Monet hangs here too.
The museum began in 1868, when the town council, urged on by the local painter Louis-Alexandre Dubourg, decided to create an art museum. It spent its first decades in the town hall. When Boudin died in 1898 he left it a group of pictures, some of his own and more by fellow painters. In 1924 the collection moved into the chapel of the old Augustinian convent, and a modern wing was added in 1974.
Around Boudin hang other painters who worked on this stretch of the Normandy coast. The Realist Gustave Courbet's Norman Coast, painted in 1866, is among them, along with works by Raoul Dufy, who was born in Le Havre, just across the Seine estuary.
