Rue de la Bavole, Honfleur

Rue de la Bavole, Honfleur from 1864 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston depicts a narrow street in the Norman port town where Monet had first seriously learned to paint under Eugène Boudin's guidance in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Honfleur's significance in the history of French landscape painting was considerable: the town had attracted Corot, Daubigny, and Jongkind before Boudin and Monet, and its harbor, coastal light, and vernacular Norman architecture had served as a training ground for the naturalist approach to outdoor painting. The narrow street subject — buildings on each side forming a spatial funnel — was a compositional type with long precedent in Dutch and French urban painting, and Monet's handling shows the careful tonal observation of his academic training under Gleyre alongside the looser plein-air touch he was developing from Boudin. The MFA Boston holds this work alongside major later Monet canvases, enabling visitors to trace his development from this 1864 street scene to the serial masterpieces of the 1890s — a development more rapid and more radical than almost any other in the history of nineteenth-century painting.

The narrow street creates a spatial funnel drawing the eye into the depth of the composition, with buildings on each side providing a strong vertical framework. Monet renders the varied stone and plaster surfaces with attentive tonal observation. The handling is more careful and descriptive than his later Impressionist work, showing his academic formation under Gleyre.