Strand bei Trouville

Courbet spent the summer of 1865 at Trouville, a Normandy fishing town that the new railway from Paris had turned into a fashionable bathing resort almost overnight. He went partly to sell to the crowds of holidaymakers, and he painted dozens of these sea studies that season, often finishing one in an afternoon with a palette knife. This one holds almost nothing: a broad wet beach at low tide, a low horizon, and most of the canvas given over to a heavy, shifting sky. There are no bathers and no fashionable parasols, only the weather. That same summer he shared the coast with the young American painter Whistler and worked on a portrait of Whistler's red-haired companion, Jo.