Marine

In the autumn of 1865 Courbet was at Trouville, on the Normandy coast, where Parisians had begun arriving by train to bathe and be seen. He turned his back on all of that. By his own count he painted about 25 seascapes there that season, each, he said, freer than the last, and this is one of them. There are no boats, no bathers, no story. Just the wet sand left by a low tide, a low band of sea darkening toward the horizon, and a wide sky where heavy clouds hold back a late sun. Much of it he laid on with a palette knife rather than a brush, dragging the paint so thickly that critics accused him of using a trowel. The Normandy shore he painted here, plain and unpeopled, is the same coast a younger generation would take up a few years later.