トゥーク川の河口

Boudin died at Deauville in August 1898, having asked that his studio go to Le Havre, the port where he had kept a framing shop as a young man and where he had talked a teenage Monet into painting out of doors. In 1900 his brother Louis carried out the wish and gave the city 240 works, small things on canvas, cardboard and panel that had never been meant for sale. This is one of them. It shows the mouth of the Touques, the short river that reaches the sea between Trouville and Deauville, and the museum dates it somewhere between 1890 and 1894. It measures 32 centimetres by 46, a size a painter can hold on his knees on a riverbank.