freshly and vigorously conceived
canvases and panels, which record the impressions of a precursor of the
Impressionists in presence of the Channel waters, and of those autumn
skies, or skies of summer, now radiant, now uncertain, which hung over
the small ports and the rocky or chalk-cliff coasts, over the
watering-places, Trouville, Dieppe, and over those larger harbours, with
_port_ and _avant-port_ and _bassin_, of Dunkirk, of Havre. In the war
time, Boudin was in Brittany and then in the Low Countries. About
1875-1876 he was at Rotterdam and Bordeaux. That great bird's-eye
vision of Bordeaux which is in the Luxembourg dates from these years,
and in these years he was at Rotterdam, the companion of Jongkind, with
whom he had so much in common, but whose work, like his, free and
fearless and unconventional, can never be said with accuracy to have
seriously influenced his own. Doing excellent things continually through
all the 'seventies, when he was in late middle age--gaining scope in
colour, having now so many notes--faithful no longer wholly to his
amazing range of subtle greys, now blithe and silvery, now nobly
deep--sending to the Salon great canvases, and to the few enlightened
people who would buy them of him the _toile_ or panel of most moderate
size on which he best of all expressed himself--Boudin was yet not
acceptable to the public or to the fashionable dealer. The late
'eighties had to come and Boudin to be elderly before there was a sale
for his work at any prices that were in the least substantial. Broadly
speaking his work in those very 'eighties was not so good as the labour,
essentially delicate and fresh and just, of some years earlier, nor had
it always the attractiveness of the impulsive deliverances of some years
later, when the inspired sketch was the thing that he generally stopped
at. Old age found him strong and receptive. Only in the very last year
of his life was there perceptible a positive deterioration. Not very
long before it, Boudin, in a visit to Venice, had produced impressions
of Venice for which much more was to be said than that they were not
Ziem's. And the deep colouring of the South, on days when the sunshine
blazes least, had been caught by him and presented nobly at Antibes and
Villefranche. At last, resorting to the south again as a refuge from
ill-health, and recognizing soon that the relief it could give him was
almost spent, he resolved that it should not be for him, in th