Bathing Time at Deauville

Deauville was barely five years old when Boudin signed this. The duc de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon III and one of the great speculators of the Second Empire, had bought the marshy dunes opposite Trouville in 1860 and had an entire resort put up on them, with a racecourse and a railway from Paris by 1863. Morny died in March 1865. The bathers Boudin painted that season were using a town whose inventor had just been buried.

The huts standing out on the sand are bathing machines, wheeled down to the water by horse so that a woman could change and enter the sea unseen from the beach. Boudin dated the corner E. Boudin 65.

It is painted on wood, 35 centimetres by 57, and it reached the National Gallery of Art in Washington from Paul Mellon, who had bought it in 1963.