Honfleur : la ferme Saint-Siméon

Above Honfleur, on the slope looking over the mouth of the Seine, stood a cider farm that took in lodgers. In the 1850s it was cheap and it was outdoors, and painters began staying there, first a handful, then enough that people talked about a colony. Boudin was among the earliest, renting space at the farm around 1854, and Courbet turned up later. What he made there is small. The panel is about 17 centimetres high and 40 wide, a long letterbox format, and the Museum Barberini catalogues it by what is in it, the farm and some seated figures. He was just past 30, and the beaches he is now known for were still ahead of him. The farm later turned into a hotel, and the Ferme Saint-Simeon is still taking guests at Honfleur.