Beach at Trouville

The railway reached Trouville in 1863, and within a few summers the Normandy sand was covered in Parisians who had come mainly to be looked at. Boudin painted them again and again in their town clothes, crinolines and top hats on the beach. He was uneasy about it and said so in his letters, and he kept doing it because those pictures sold. He signed this panel E. Boudin 69 and wrote Trouville along the left side. The Empire that filled those beaches had a year left.

The panel then had an odd war. A German buyer acquired it in Paris in 1942 for the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, and it came back to France in the first convoy from Düsseldorf in March 1948. It is still catalogued as MNR 197, one of the recovered works the French state holds while it looks for the rightful owners. It hangs at Compiègne, in the rooms given to the Second Empire, in the palace where Napoleon III held his autumn house parties.