Deauville, Beach Scene

Boudin wrote two things on this little wooden panel, his signature with the year 90 at the lower left and the name Deauville at the lower right. It is about 18 centimetres by 27, and it shows an ordinary day on the sand. A row of bathing huts stands on the left, a woman in red stands among the seated groups, a boat with a dark green hull has been pulled up the beach, and a few small figures sit in the foreground. It passed through the London dealers Arthur Tooth and Sons and Wildenstein in New York, and before 1958 it belonged to Florence Gould, an American-born collector who lived in Cannes. That summer it hung in an exhibition of Boudin and his Dutch friend Jongkind at a gallery in Aix-en-Provence. After her death it was sold at Sotheby's in New York in April 1985, then twice more in London, and later again in Paris.