Camaret. Il porto durante un temporale

The older painter Corot once called Eugène Boudin the king of skies, and you can see why in this view of the Breton harbour of Camaret under a breaking storm. Most of the canvas is weather. The boats and the low town are squeezed into a strip along the bottom while the grey, shifting clouds take everything above. Boudin came back to paint at Camaret nearly every year in the early 1870s, chasing exactly these unsettled skies out in the open air. That habit mattered beyond his own work. Years earlier, on the coast near Le Havre, he had talked a sceptical teenager named Claude Monet into painting outdoors from nature. This storm dates from 1873. The following spring Monet and his friends held the first Impressionist exhibition, and Boudin showed his own paintings alongside them.