Beach at Trouville

On 30 January 1875 the French parliament voted, by a margin of a single vote, to write the election of a president of the Republic into the country's new constitutional laws. That summer, on the sand at Trouville, the Paris holiday crowd looked much as it had under the emperor. Women in dark and grey dresses sit on chairs, a man wears a straw hat, and small children in white sit among them. Boudin painted them on a wooden panel about 12 by 24 centimetres and wrote Trouville 75 in the lower right corner, with his signature on the left. Each figure is only a few quick strokes, and the pale blue-grey sky fills about half the panel. In 1926 the English textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld bought it, and in 1932 it was among the paintings he gave to the new London institute that carries his name.