Eugène Boudin, 'Beach Scene, Trouville', 1873

Boudin was born in Honfleur, the son of a ship’s captain, and always preferred to paint seaside subjects, specialising in those which showed the Normandy coast. The centre of his early activities was Le Havre, where he opened a framing shop that was visited by painters, including Jean-Francois Millet, who encouraged him to take up painting. Although he started off painting seascapes, he found a niche in the 1860s producing beach scenes. These showed well-to-do holidaymakers from Paris and abroad who arrived at the fast developing resorts of Trouville and Deauville to sample the health-giving benefits of seabathing and the vibrant social life. He produced a few hundred of these paintings, which have come to define his reputation, something he himself foresaw when he wrote: ‘I shall do something else, but I shall always be a painter of beach scenes.’

Boudin’s pictures were distinctly modern in their subject matter, and drew admiration from his more forward-thinking contemporaries. He reflected in a letter of 1868: ’ I have been congratulated for daring to include things and people of our own time in my pictures, for having found a way of making acceptable men in overcoats and women in waterproofs …This attempt isn‘t new, for the Italians and Flemish painted the people of their own times …’ He continued: ‘The peasants have their favourite painters: Millet, Jacque, Breton, and that’s fine…But don’t these bourgeois, who stroll on the jetty towards the sunset, have the right to be fixed on canvas, to be brought to the light? Between ourselves, they are often resting from hard toil, these men who emerge from their offices and their studies.’

This painting is typical of Boudin’s many sketches of beaches in showing groups of people ranged along the beach in a frieze-like composition, the whites, reds and blues of their costumes standing out against the silvery greys of the sea and sky. Two other similar paintings of holidaymakers on the beach, Beach Scene, Trouville, probably painted in the 1860s, and Beach Scene, Trouville, probably painted 1870–4, are in the National Gallery’s collection, as well as a much later scene of an almost empty beach in a gale .