Beach at Trouville

The railway reached this coast in 1863, the year the picture was painted. The line from Paris through Lisieux put Trouville about five hours from the capital, and the beach filled with people who would never have made the trip by road. Boudin came from Honfleur, a few miles up the estuary, and he had been painting these crowds for two or three summers already. He knew what he had. In a letter from that same year he called them his little ladies on the beach and noted that people were telling him there was a vein of gold in them to be worked. Most of his beach scenes push the figures back into a wide space. This one comes in close, a handful of figures under a flat grey sky, with the flag and the crinolines pulled sideways by the same wind. It looks painted on the spot, though reworked patches show him shifting the figures about afterwards.