Beach at Trouville

By 1888 there was a steady trade in exactly this. Boudin had been handled by the dealer Durand-Ruel since 1881, a sale of his work went through the Hotel Drouot in Paris that year, and buyers wanted small beach scenes faster than a man of 64 could supply them. This one is about 15 centimetres by 25, painted on a wooden panel roughly the size of a paintbox lid.

Trouville was an old resort by then. The railway had reached the estuary in 1863 and much of the fashionable trade had moved across the water to newer Deauville, which left the long tidal sands and the shifting Channel weather Boudin had been coming back for since the 1860s.

The panel hangs now in Pasadena, California. It was given to the Norton Simon Museum by the film actor Cary Grant.