View of Bordeaux, from the Quai des Chartrons (1874): Art, History and Details

View of Bordeaux, from the Quai des Chartrons (1874) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Boudin (French, 1824–1898).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In 1873, Boudin made his first visit to the important port city of Bordeaux as a guest of the resident art collector Arthur Bourges. Between 1874 and 1876, Boudin made paintings of the city's harbor and docks. This was an especially stimulating time in Boudin's career, as he was invited to exhibit in 1874 with the newly-founded Société anonyme des artistes, soon to be known as the Impressionists. As in many of his views, Boudin concentrated here on the quais or working docks where goods were loaded and unloaded and sailors left in small dinghies for the larger vessels on which they worked. The low horizon line relegates much of the canvas to pure sky, but the soaring vertical and diagonal forms of the masts complement this horizontal thrust and open space. Many contemporaries greatly admired Boudin's ability to paint skies. Here, one can see the way in which he brushed on a tan color, then went over it, probably while it was still wet, with a thin but opaque application of white, to create a fresh, airy quality. For the darker areas representing water, Boudin laid in an olive-green tone.

Object facts

• Title: View of Bordeaux, from the Quai des Chartrons
• Date: 1874
• Creator attribution: Eugène Boudin (French, 1824–1898)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Framed: 80.5 x 115.5 x 10 cm (31 11/16 x 45 1/2 x 3 15/16 in.); Unframed: 54.7 x 89.5 cm (21 9/16 x 35 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1986.73

A detail from the museum

Pentimenti, the visible trace of earlier painting, appears among the diagonal rigging of the small ship at the left, indicating that the artist did not thoroughly work out his composition before beginning his picture and slightly changed the position of these lines while painting.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund and Gift of Mrs. Dudley S. Blossom Jr.

Further reading listed by the museum

• Joseph Baillio, letter to Roger Diederen, Sept. 9, 1996, in CMA curatorial file.
• Joseph Baillio, letter to Roger Diederen, Sept. 9, 1996, in CMA curatorial file.
• E.J. van Wisselingh & co. Maîtres français XIXme et XXme siècles, 17 juillet-9 septembre 1950. Amsterdam: E.J. Van Wisselingh & Co, 1950.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.