Deauville, the Basin

Deauville barely existed a generation before Boudin painted this. In the 1860s the Duc de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon III, had willed a fashionable resort out of the Normandy marshes, and Boudin made his early name there sketching the crinolined Paris crowds who came to be seen on the sand. By 1884, when he set up here at the harbor basin, he was 60 and looking the other way, past the beach to the working port. The composition is almost all sky, with the single tall mast of a moored boat cutting up through it and the water held low and flat at the bottom. Corot had called him the king of skies, and the young Monet learned to paint outdoors at his side on this same coast. The boats he chose were the everyday fishing and cargo craft that shared the elegant town's water.