Abbeville. La iglesia de Saint-Vulfran

Boudin spent his working life on beaches and harbours, and then in his late sixties he went inland to Abbeville, in the Somme, and painted its collegiate church of Saint-Vulfran from one fixed spot. He did it twice, once by day and once at night, with the same framing both times. This is the night version, a small wooden panel painted in quick, sweeping strokes, the stone lit by moonlight that shifts as the clouds move. Monet was at work on his Rouen Cathedral facades in these same years, about 100 kilometres to the south-west, in Rouen on the Seine. Boudin, who had talked the teenage Monet into painting outdoors at Le Havre in the 1850s, was made a knight of the Legion of Honour in 1892 and died six years later.