Anvers, Bateaux sur l’Escaut

• 1872
• oil on cradled panel
• 15 1/8 x 22 ¼ inches

PROVENANCE:

• Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 24 March 1952
• The Lord Rootes, Hungerford; his sale, Christie’s London, 2 December 1991, lot 4.

EXHIBITED:

• London, Marlborough Fine Art, Eugene Boudin 1824-1989, 1958, no. 17.

LITERATURE:

• R. Schmit, Eugene Boudin, catalogue raisonne de l’oeuvre peint, vol. I, Paris, 1973, no. 768 (illustrated p. 274).

In 1870, Boudin travelled to Brussels and to Anvers, where he painted a series of views taken from the banks of the Escaux to which the present "Anvers, Bateaux sur l'Escaut" belongs.

Writing about Boudin and his ports, the critic Gustave Geffroy observed that "In love with the sea whatever the time of the day or the year, he has stopped everywhere and noted all of the different aspects of the same landscape. He knows all the inlets, and ports, all the river mouths. He paints life and solitude; the dramas occurring between the stones and the water interest him as much as the goings-on in a coastal town. He records alluvial formations, the pools of water left far inland by tides; he also records docks cluttered with highsided vessels. He is full of the poetry of the sea and he is wholly familiar with the technique of navigation' (quoted in exh. cat. V. Hamilton, Boudin at Trouville, Glasgow, 1992)