On the Beach at Trouville

In the middle of this beach a horse is towing a wooden hut on wheels down into the shallows. It is a bathing cabin, and in the 1860s it was how a lady at Trouville got into the sea. She climbed in, often with her maid, changed into a bathing dress that covered her from neck to ankle while the horse pulled her out, and stepped down into the water out of sight of the beach. Boudin puts the horse and cabin near the centre of the panel and pushes the fashionable crowd to the left, packed together on chairs under parasols, while a couple strolls past with a small black dog nearby. He signed and dated the lower right corner E. Boudin, 63. The picture came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1907, in the bequest of the New York collector Amelia B. Lazarus.