Juan-les-pins, the Bay and the Shore

Boudin went south in the winters of the early 1890s, partly for his health, and this is the bay at Juan-les-Pins in 1893, when he was 69. The place was then a quiet strip of shore between Antibes and Golfe-Juan, a few villas among the pines. The hotels, the casino and the summer crowds that made the name famous arrived 30 years later. Monet had worked just along the coast at Antibes in 1888 and complained bitterly about the light there. Boudin, who had spent 40 years on the grey Channel beaches of Normandy, handled the Mediterranean much as he had handled Trouville, giving the sky most of the canvas and keeping the people small, figures on the embankment, parasols by the trees, boats pulled up on the sand. It went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1999, a gift from Eunice and Julian Cohen.