Eugène Boudin was born in Normandy in 1824 and died there in 1898. His father was a sailor on one of the first steamships that ran between Le Havre and Honfleur, and Boudin worked as cabin boy on his father's ship, observing from an early age the ever-changing sea and sky that would become his primary focus as a painter. In 1836, at age twelve, he began to work in a stationery and frame shop. The owner gave him a box of paints, but little else is known about Boudin's early interest in art. At twenty he co-owned a business, framing and selling the works of visiting artists. In 1847 he sold his half of the shop to pay his way out of military service. Sponsored by his former artist-clients, Boudin went to Paris to study and copy in the Louvre. In 1851 the town of Le Havre awarded him a three-year scholarship.

Boudin quickly established the pattern he would follow throughout his career: in summer he traveled to paint outdoor sketches that he would complete in his Paris studio over the winter. He stayed along the Channel coast, mostly in Normandy and Brittany. Though he painted inland landscapes, peasant scenes, and still lifes, it was the seaside, especially its river estuaries and harbors, that most attracted Boudin's eye. In 1862 he started painting the droves of fashionable tourists who vacationed at Normandy beach resorts. These pictures—his best known—were highly marketable and number in the thousands.

In the 1860s Boudin did not yet consider his outdoor studies fully finished; he felt they should be "poussé" (elaborated), as he said, to completion using notes, sketches, and memory. He meticulously recorded details about atmosphere, weather, and times of day (and inscribed this information on his sketches). He wrote to a student: "An impression is gained in an instant, but it then has to be condensed following the rules of art or rather your own feeling and that is the most difficult thing—to finish a painting without spoiling anything." At the same time, Boudin also claimed "everything that is painted directly and on the spot has always a strength, a power, a vivacity of touch which one cannot recover in the studio." Eventually Boudin would paint almost entirely en plein air, saying that one brushstroke placed outdoors was of more value than two days spent in the studio. His work foreshadowed impressionist concerns with atmosphere and the changing effects of weather and light. Corot called him "the king of the skies."

Boudin had a strong connection with Brittany and the paintings he did on his summer visits to Finistere. Boudin lived and worked in Le Havre where he met a young Breton woman who was working as a waitress, they eventually got married and Boudin began taking long summer working “holidays” to his wife’s part of France. He visited regularly for 6, maybe 8 years until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war when it became impossible for an artist to work “en plein air”. On the Brittany coast for fear of being accused of being a spy.

Boudin stayed in a seaside hamlet called Troan and visited La Faou which was a little place within easy walking distance which this painting is almost certainly depicting. Le Faou has a wide tidal creek which the river referred to in the title flows into. Le Faou has some wonderful medieval merchant’s houses and was once a very busy and prosperous port.