オンフルール、古い波止場

At the end of July 1830 Paris spent three days in the street. The July Revolution put Charles the Tenth on a boat to England and Louis-Philippe on the throne, and Corot, 34 years old and no revolutionary, left town. He went first to Chartres, where he began the cathedral picture he is still known for, and then on into Normandy.

Honfleur was one of the stops. This is the old basin, the harbour at the mouth of the Seine that Boudin and then Monet would paint from the same quays a generation later. Corot made it outdoors and fast, as he made hundreds of studies in those years, and he did not regard them as pictures to exhibit. They were raw material for the large Salon canvases he assembled afterwards in the studio.

It is a small canvas, roughly 30 by 43 centimetres, and the RISD Museum in Providence has had it since 1943.