Bénerville, the Beach

By 1890 the beaches west of Deauville had become a summer habit for Parisians. The railway had reached this stretch of Normandy a generation earlier, and on a fine day the sand filled with people who had stepped off a morning train, still dressed for the city. Boudin had been painting exactly this for decades, the wide wet foreshore, the little knots of figures, and above all the sky, which takes up most of the canvas here. The painter Corot had nicknamed him the king of skies, and he earned it by working outdoors, watching the weather shift over the Channel. He was 66 that year, and wrote of himself as a loner content to stay in his corner of the world and look up. That low horizon and the pale, moving light are what he had spent a lifetime learning to catch quickly, before the clouds moved on.