Rising tide on the bay, Saint-Valéry

Eugène Boudin painted this calm beach scene at Saint-Valéry in 1891, and it shows exactly what he loved most throughout his career: the meeting of sea, sand, and sky. Boudin spent so much time painting beaches and open horizons that the artist Camille Corot nicknamed him "the king of the skies." You can see why here. More than half the canvas is given over to soft clouds drifting across a pale blue expanse, with loose, quick brushstrokes that capture the changing light of the Normandy coast.

Boudin holds a special place in art history because he was an early mentor to the young Claude Monet, encouraging him to paint outdoors directly from nature. That habit of working in the open air helped shape Impressionism, and Boudin himself is often seen as one of its forerunners. In this painting you can spot a few tiny figures gathered near the dunes and some sailboats far out on the water, but the real subject is the wide, breezy atmosphere of the shore. It is a quiet, honest picture, the kind of everyday seaside moment that Boudin returned to again and again.