Normandy Thatched Cottage, Old Trouville

Trouville, at the mouth of the Touques on the Normandy coast, was a small fishing town when painters began to arrive in the 1820s, and Paul Huet was among the first of them. By the 1850s the fashion for sea bathing had turned it into a resort, with grand hotels, a casino and villas for visitors from Paris.

This small canvas, less than 40 centimetres wide, looks away from all that. It shows a thatched cottage seen at an angle, wooden walls over a solid base, a lean-to with its door open on the right, shutters open by the entrance, and a farmyard strewn with loose timber. It is also known by the name Old Trouville, the village that stood there before the resort.

The Louvre's record gives the year 1861 but also places the picture in the second quarter of the century, and the two dates have not been reconciled. It came to the museum in 1896 as a gift from the painter's son, René-Paul Huet.