Marine, Norman Shore

By the mid-1850s Boudin was in his early thirties and had started doing something many studio painters still thought a waste of effort. He carried his paints down to the Normandy shore and worked straight from the sea in front of him. This is one of those early stretches of coast, painted a few years before the fashionable summer crowds in their beach dresses would fill his pictures and make his name. There is little in it but shoreline, water and a wide bank of sky, the ordinary weather of one hour on the northern French coast set down while it lasted.