图克河上的船

The Touques is a short Normandy river, and the two towns at its mouth could hardly have been more different. Trouville had grown slowly out of a fishing village. Deauville, on the opposite bank, was made from marshland in the 1860s as a speculation by the Duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III, who had a railway line run down from Paris and a racecourse built. Boudin worked this stretch of coast every summer from the mid-1860s and put up a house for himself in Deauville in 1884, so he watched the shipping change at close range as yachts crowded in beside the working boats. The painting is a small panel of wood, about 32 centimetres tall, done quickly on the spot. Its later history is odd. It reached the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1986 as a gift from the United States Department of Justice, which had held it after the FBI.