Figures on the Beach in Trouville

The railway reached Trouville in 1863 and turned a Normandy fishing town into the beach where Paris went in August. Boudin had been working there since the early 1860s, on small panels he could hold on his knee, and he knew the subject looked trivial to other painters. He wrote in his notebooks that peasants had their painters, and asked whether the men and women strolling on the sand toward the setting sun had less right to be fixed on canvas. This one is from 1869. Within a year the empire that filled that beach was finished, beaten by Prussia, and Boudin sat out the war in Belgium. He built the picture in flat horizontal bands of sand, crowd, sea and sky, and gave the sky most of the panel.