Figures on the Beach

Low tide has laid out a wide sheet of wet sand, and a small group has walked across it to the edge of the water, skirts hitched up, one of them under a parasol. They have not looked up yet. Behind them the sky has turned a heavy blue-grey, and the slanting strokes Boudin dragged along the horizon are rain, already falling out at sea and heading for the beach. Each figure is only a few dabs of paint, put down fast, the way he had to work with weather like this on the way. He signed the canvas in the lower left corner with a date whose last digit has partly worn away, and the museum reads it as 93, when he was in his late sixties. Its early owners in France are not known. It went through a Paris auction in 1952, and in 1975 the Boston collector William Appleton Coolidge bought it in New York from a firm called the Antique Porcelain Company. He left it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1993.