Deauville at Low Tide

Under his signature Boudin wrote the place and the day, Deauville, 10 August, with the year 97. August was the height of the season there, and it shows on the right, where a cluster of white sails is out on the water, while the villas and pointed roofs of the resort line the shore on the left. The tide has gone a long way out. Most of the foreground is wet sand and weed, with a couple of tiny figures wading at the waterline. Boudin was 73 and had built his own house in this town 13 years earlier. Almost exactly a year after he dated the canvas, on 8 August 1898, he died there. It is large for him, 95 centimetres across. In 1901 it was sold at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris for 4,200 francs to the dealer Durand-Ruel, whose New York branch sold it in 1908 to a Boston buyer named Milliken. It came down through the Parker side of that family until Mary Parker left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1981.