Lot 2171 Dα

This painting, signed in the lower left and dated 1853, is very probably a previously unknown early work by Eugène Boudin.
The young artist spent the years between 1851 and 1853 in Paris on a scholarship paid for by the city of Le Havre. There he mainly studied the Dutch landscape painters in the Louvre and, like his role model Camille Corot, painted the countryside around Paris en plein air. It was also in Paris that he sold his first small paintings through the art dealer Firmin Martin. He returned to his homeland of Normandy in 1853, where he soon encountered his most characteristic motifs: The beach and harbour scenes of Le Havre and Honfleur, which can now be admired in many museums around the world.
Robert Schmidt's catalogue raisonné from the 1970s includes several comparable landscapes with figures painted during Boudin's initial creative period. The motif of a broad path dotted with a few carefully placed trees can also be seen in a few of his surviving works from the early 1850s.
The present painting was analysed by the Dörner Institute in Munich in 2007. There they discovered in a microscopic examination that the signature and date were not superimposed, but were created at the same time as the painting.