港の入り口

Boudin signed this at the lower left with his name and the last two digits of the year, 73. He was 49 and had been painting the Channel ports for 20 years, usually standing on the quay in whatever weather was going, which is how he had once talked a teenaged Monet at Le Havre into working outdoors instead of in a room. The following spring he hung canvases in the first independent exhibition the younger Paris painters put on for themselves, the oldest man in the room by some distance. This picture crossed the Atlantic early. It was bought at auction in 1876 by Henry Clay Angell, a Boston collector, and his widow gave it to the museum in 1916, which is why a small French harbour has been hanging in Massachusetts for over a century.