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Boudin painted this stretch of the Bordeaux docks in 1874, the year a group of younger artists he had encouraged held their own show in Paris after years of Salon rejections, the exhibition that got them mocked as Impressionists. Boudin was invited and hung several canvases in it. He was older than most of them. Years earlier on the Normandy coast he had taken the teenage Monet outdoors and taught him to paint the sky and the shifting light straight from nature. You can see that lesson here. The horizon sits very low, most of the canvas is given over to open sky, and the masts of the moored ships rise up through it.