El puerto de Trouville

In 1884 Boudin was building himself a house at Deauville, across the water from Trouville, the resort whose beach he had been painting since the 1860s. His success had come late. Paul Durand-Ruel took him on as a dealer in 1881 and gave him his first one-man show in Paris in 1883, and what the dealer wanted was the coast. By then Boudin was painting harbours as often as beaches, masts and hulls and working boats, because what he was after was moving water, drifting cloud and the light sitting on both. This is a small canvas, 46 by 65 centimetres. It hangs in Bogotá, where Fernando Botero gave it to the Bank of the Republic in 2000 along with 84 other works from his own collection.