Fishermen's Wives at the Seaside

1872 brought the first full summer season on the Normandy coast after the war with Prussia and the fighting in Paris. Boudin had sat that war out in Brussels and Antwerp, and he came back to beaches he had been painting since the early 1860s. What made his name there was the holiday crowd off the Paris train, women in wide skirts settled on the sand at Trouville and Deauville under an enormous sky. The fishermen's wives were the other population of the same shore, the one that had been there before the resorts arrived. Boudin's father worked the harbour at Honfleur and he grew up among those households. He painted this on a wooden panel a little over half a metre high, the size you can carry under one arm.