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In the autumn of 1865 Courbet took rooms at Trouville, the fashionable new bathing resort on the Normandy coast, and worked at a furious pace alongside the younger American painter James McNeill Whistler. In a letter home he told his father he had turned out 35 paintings in a matter of weeks and left everyone stunned. Most of those were quick portraits of society women and studies of grey sea and sky. This one is different. The boat sits hauled up on the sand, still rigged and loaded with its gear, and Courbet lets it hold the whole picture rather than tucking it into a corner of the beach. When it reached New York in 1899, it was the first work by Courbet the Metropolitan ever owned.