On the Beach, Sunset

The railway from Paris reached Trouville in 1863, and within two summers the Normandy sand was crowded every August with people who had been at their desks that morning. Boudin grew up along this coast, at Honfleur, and painted the new arrivals over and over on small panels like this one, worked outdoors while the light was going. He knew how the subject looked. A few years after this picture he wrote to his friend Ferdinand Martin asking whether these bourgeois strolling on the jetty toward the setting sun had no right to be fixed on canvas. The sky takes about two thirds of the panel and the figures sit in a low dark band beneath it. They are dressed for a city street, and that is roughly what the beach was in 1865, a boardwalk promenade where Paris doctors had sent their patients for the salt air.