Deauville Harbor, High Tide

Deauville was barely 30 years old when Boudin painted this. In the early 1860s it was still marshland by the sea, until the Duc de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon the Third, had it drained and built into a resort. A railway from Paris reached it in 1863 and brought the fashionable crowd down to the beach. Boudin knew the place from the start. He had summered on this coast since the 1860s and built his own house in Deauville in 1884, and over the years he painted the harbor again and again as fishing boats and pleasure yachts crowded in. Here he catches the basin at high tide, the hulls riding up close to the quay, and above them the wide, shifting Normandy sky he studied all his life. He was in his mid-60s by now, and still came back to the same water every season.