Strandszene in Trouville

By the time Boudin painted this in 1874, the beach at Trouville on the Normandy coast had become the summer address of fashionable Paris. The railway had reached it a generation earlier, and city families now brought their parasols and Sunday clothes down to sit on the open sand, something their grandparents would have found strange. Boudin painted these gatherings over and over, keeping the figures small under enormous skies, far more interested in the weather and the light than in any single face. He had grown up on this coast and once pressed a teenaged Monet to paint outdoors from life. The dressed-up crowd on the sand is doing exactly what the trains had made newly possible, treating the shoreline as a place to be seen.