Beach at Trouville

Boudin painted this in 1863 on a wooden panel less than half a metre wide, and he gave most of it to the sky. The people are pressed into one low band along the sand: women in wide crinolines sitting on chairs, a man in a top hat, a parasol held up against the light, a child in yellow bent over the sand, a small dog trotting past. On the rise at the right stand the tall-roofed villas of the resort, and out on the horizon there is a single sail.

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford bought the panel in 1948 through its Sumner fund, a bequest left by a Hartford banker in memory of his wife and her sister. That same fund also paid for Claude Monet's Beach at Trouville, which Monet painted on this same stretch of sand in the summer of 1870, seven years after Boudin's picture.