Bénerville, la côte

Boudin wrote the day on this canvas as well as the year. Under his signature at lower right you can read 31 October 1897, well after the bathing season had emptied the Normandy resorts. He was 73 and in poor health, and for several years he had been spending his winters in the milder south. This is the coast at Bénerville, a few kilometres west of Deauville, where he had a house, seen from the grassy slope of a cliff. A single walker is on the path near the top, rocks break the surface of the shallow water, and a few sailing boats stand off the shore under a wide grey sky. That winter he went south again, and he died in Deauville the following August. The painting reached Rotterdam in 1958 with the collection of the businessman Daniël George van Beuningen.