Eugène Boudin, 'Beach Scene, Trouville', about 1870-4

Boudin was born and grew up on the Normandy coast, and it remained his favourite subject. Although he spent winters in Paris and also ventured further afield to Brittany, Belgium, Holland, the south of France and Venice, he was drawn back to the seaside each summer by the quality of the light and the subtle grey and blue harmonies of the sky and sea.

The weather there may have been bracing, but the towns Trouville and Deauville were rapidly developing into smart holiday resorts, with new hotels and villas – whose presence is hinted at in the buildings on the right of this picture. Well-to-do holidaymakers from Paris and further away flocked to Trouville’s wide sandy beach intent on sea bathing, a newly fashionable pursuit that was thought to be good for the health. Boudin found a ready market for his small scenes that chronicled the summer activity on the Normandy coast. As the critic Castagnary remarked, ‘ Boudin invented a genre. He was the first to think of showing formally dressed Parisians, surrounded by air and sun on stretches of beach where the wind is blowing; this was successful and deserved to be.’

Here well-dressed men and women stroll up and down, relax on chairs or sit on the sand, and nannies look after children by a white bathing hut. The ladies appear to wear bustles, which became the height of fashion in the 1870s. A flag in the upper right-hand corner flutters in the sea breeze.

Like many of Boudin’s small beach scenes, the picture appears to have been painted quickly. A child in the foreground is sketched in with a few rapid dabs of blue and yellow paint, and the briefest of brushstrokes indicate human activity and sea bathing in the left background. We can make out the poses of the figures and the direction in which they are looking, but it is impossible to distinguish individual facial features. It is the large expanse of sky occupying more than half the canvas that seems to have been Boudin’s chief concern here, rather than precise details of human interaction.

This painting, together with Boudin’s Beach Scene, Trouville, was owned by Monet, who also grew up on the Normandy coast and described Boudin as his master, claiming that he had opened his eyes to the beauty of nature. The fashions suggest that the paintings were probably not conceived as a pair, but were painted at different times. Monet was working alongside Boudin during the summer of 1870 and it has been proposed that one of the women in his The Beach at Trouville is Boudin’s wife. Unlike that picture, however, which features Monet’s family in close-up, the people on Boudin’s beach are anonymous strangers seen from some distance.