ル・アーヴル:夕日の外港

In 1882 Le Havre was the second busiest port in France after Marseille, the place transatlantic steamers left for New York, and its outer harbour had been modernised to handle them. Almost none of that shows here. Boudin put the setting sun in the middle of the canvas and let the sky repeat itself in the water, so the shipping reads as dark shapes on a field of light. Meeting the sun head on was not the habit of the Dutch marine painters he had copied as a young man. That frontal placement comes from Poussin and from Turner. Boudin was 58 when he painted it, and he had known this water all his life. He grew up in Honfleur across the estuary, where his father worked the harbour boats, and as a boy he sailed the crossing to Le Havre.