On the Beach, Trouville

This is a small thing, oil on a panel of wood barely a foot wide, the kind of quick study Boudin could paint in an hour on the sand and carry home in a coat pocket. By 1887 he had been returning to this same beach at Trouville, on the Normandy coast, for more than 20 years, painting the summer visitors in their dark coats and pale dresses over and over as the fashions slowly changed. Here the crowd has thinned to a row of small figures near the water, and more than half the panel is given to the wide, shifting sky above them.