Low Tide, Berck

By 1886 Boudin had tired of the fashionable beaches. He had made his name in the 1860s painting crinolined Parisians on the sand at Trouville, but in his sixties he preferred Berck, a working fishing village on the northern coast, and he painted it in the empty off-season. Here the tide is out and the people are locals bent over the flats digging for clams, figures no bigger than commas beneath an enormous, shifting sky. That sky is the real subject. The older painter Corot had nicknamed Boudin the king of the skies, and Boudin had handed his habit of painting outdoors, in the weather, straight to the young Claude Monet. He keeps the horizon low, so that most of the canvas is simply moving air over wet sand.