Figures on a Beach

In February 1863 Eugène Boudin wrote to his friend Ferdinand Martin that people very much liked his little ladies on the beach, and that some were saying there was a vein of gold to be mined there. He had only started painting the summer visitors at Trouville, on the Normandy coast, the season before, tired of scraping a living from commissions, and he had married in Le Havre a few weeks earlier.

This small wooden panel comes from those first seasons. Women in wide crinolines sit on chairs set out on the sand under their parasols, dressed as if for a Paris street. Boudin went on painting that crowd for more than 30 years. This one reached the RISD Museum in Providence in 1986, a gift from a local couple, Mr. and Mrs. Houghton P. Metcalf.