Festival in the Harbor of Honfleur

Eugène Boudin

National Gallery of Art

This horizontal painting shows a harbor scene filled with tall-masted ships and steamships adorned with colorful flags. The masts of the ship to our left dominate the composition, reaching almost to the top edge of the painting. This ship has a black and white hull and is docked alongside a quay lined with buildings in the left third of the painting. The masts are rigged with ropes and draped with long, strings of flags in red, yellow, blue, and white. A group of people with light-colored clothing gather in small boats around the ship to our left. Another vessel moored in the middle of the painting is also strung with flags, and to our right, a dark steamship with a single smokestack is festooned with similar banners. It floats farther from the quay and town buildings. The water is busy with many people swimming or floating, particularly toward the lower right. Dense buildings line the opposite shore under a blue sky scattered with soft, white clouds. The horizon comes about a third of the way up the composition so most of the flags are outlined against the sky. The artist signed the lower left corner, “Boudin” with the number 5 followed by an illegible number. In the lower right is the location with some of the letters missing so it reads “Hon eur.”