Bathers on the Beach at Trouville

The railway reached Trouville in 1863, and within a few seasons a fishing town on the Normandy coast had become the beach where Paris spent August. Boudin worked there every summer, setting up on the sand among the visitors and painting them on small panels like this one, wide and low so that most of the picture is sky. He had doubts about the subject. He once wrote that peasants had their painters and that the townspeople strolling on the jetty towards the sunset deserved to be fixed on canvas as well. This was the summer of 1869. The next year France went to war with Prussia and Boudin left for Brussels. The panel came to the French state in 1911 with the collection of Count Isaac de Camondo, whose Degas and Manet pictures hang a few rooms away from it.