Barcos varados en marea baja

In 1859 Baudelaire went round Boudin's studio and found hundreds of pastel studies of sea and sky, made on the spot, several with the weather of the day written on them in the painter's hand. What struck him was that they recorded nothing but air and water at one particular moment. Boudin was still doing exactly that 36 years later. This piece is about the size of two postcards laid end to end, 12 centimetres high by 27 across, painted in oil on paper, with the boats left sitting on the sand by the tide. On the back he wrote his name and the word study. He was in his seventies by then and died three years later at Deauville, on the coast he had been painting since the 1850s.