Lady in White on the Beach at Trouville

The railway had reached Trouville a few years before, and by the late 1860s the Normandy sand was covered every August with Parisians who had never much cared about the sea. Boudin painted them for the next thirty years. This is the summer of 1869, the last one before the Franco-Prussian War emptied the coast and sent Boudin himself across the border to Belgium for the duration. He puts the crowd in a narrow band between beach and sky, leaning into the wind, a small black dog out in front, and gives almost nobody a face. The critic Castagnary, reviewing the Salon that same year, said Boudin had hit on a new kind of seascape that consisted of painting the beach and the fashionable people summer brings to the coast. Between 1860 and 1896 he made close to three hundred of them.