La Seine à La Bouille, environs de Rouen

La Bouille is a village on the Seine downstream from Rouen, in the Norman river landscape that Lebourg knew intimately from decades of work along that stretch of the river. This 1904 view of the Seine near La Bouille belongs to his mature practice of recording the river in its seasonal moods, a project that had roots in the same Norman riverscapes that had preoccupied Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley. Lebourg's mature views of the Seine are less formally radical than the Impressionists who preceded him but share their commitment to capturing specific qualities of northern French light and atmosphere — in this case the particular overcast luminosity of the Norman river valley. The Petit Palais acquired this as part of its collection of late Impressionist landscape.

Lebourg uses a restrained palette of grey-greens, silver, and soft ochre appropriate to the overcast Norman light, applying paint in fluid, unhurried strokes that describe the river's surface and the village's low silhouette without dramatizing either. The composition follows the river's curve in a manner that naturally draws the eye through the picture.