Le Havre. L'avant-port au soleil couchant

In the representation of harbour views [Boudin] has no rival. His skies are a joy to see and his vessels always painted with inimitable skill and perfect knowledge. In his pictures there is a [good] deal of movement. One feels the bustle of hurrying out of port, or into it. The vessels sway with wind and tide, and their rigging is drawn with fascinating truth and naiveté’ (P.C. Sutton, Boudin: Impressionist Marine Paintings, exh. cat., Peabody Museum of Salem, 1991, p. 16).

By the turn of the century, Boudin’s sweeping coastal views were widely exhibited and receiving unanimous praise. The present work depicts Le Havre, a major port in the Normandy region. Boudin’s oeuvre primarily depicts seascapes and coastal towns, paying homage to his father—himself a ship’s captain—and Boudin’s upbringing in Honfleur. The Normandy coast, with its ever-changing skies and ephemeral beams of light, informed the rich atmospheres that built Boudin’s reputation. The formidable landscapist Camille Corot crowned Boudin as ‘the king of skies,’ a testament to his free brushwork and uninhibited observation of contemporary maritime life and its environs. While Boudin painted series upon series of coastal scenes in various locations, the present work underlines the impression Le Havre made on him in particular.

Among the many coastal views Boudin executed, Le Havre. L’avant-port au soleil couchant stands out as one of the most accomplished examples of his atmospheric style to come to market. Painted just a few years before the epochal 1874 Impressionist exhibition—when Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Sisley, and Pissarro would gather for the first time—it reminds us of Boudin’s essential role as precursor to the Impressionist movement. Here, in the fantastic play of sky and tide, the modern eye finds both the grandeur of nature and the pulse of human industry, rendered with Boudin’s unmistakable lightness of touch.