On the Beach

Eugène Boudin made his name in the 1860s with small scenes of well-off holidaymakers on the Normandy beaches of Trouville and Deauville, resorts then growing fast around the new fashion for sea bathing. This panel was painted in 1894, three decades later, when Boudin was about 70 and still coming back to the same subject. It is tiny, 14 by 24 centimetres, oil on a piece of wood. Along the bottom edge he wrote his name, the year 94, and a dedication to Madame Gilberte Fleury. Almost nothing is recorded about her, and the panel's path over the following half century is only partly known. In 1951 a gallery in Lucerne sold it to the New York collector Chester Dale, and it reached the National Gallery in Washington with his bequest in 1963.