Fashionable Figures on the Beach

Deauville was marshland until the early 1860s, when the duc de Morny, Napoleon III's half-brother, had a resort built there from nothing, with a racecourse and a railway line down from Paris. Trouville next door filled up the same way. Boudin had grown up in Le Havre along the same coast, and from 1862 he painted the new arrivals steadily, small panels done outdoors and sold to the sort of people standing in them. This one is about 35 centimetres high, and the crinolines and top hats take up only the bottom strip of it. The rest is weather. Boudin knew the subject was held against him. Peasants have their painters, he wrote to a friend, so why should these people strolling towards the sunset have no right to be fixed on canvas.