Plage en Normandie, France (Beach in Normandy)

Recognition reached Boudin at 65. In 1889 he was given a gold medal at the Paris world's fair, the one held around the new Eiffel Tower, and in 1892 the state made him a knight of the Legion of Honour, some 40 years into his working life. His wife died in that same year of 1889, and from then on he wintered in the south of France and came back up to the Normandy coast for the season. This beach belongs to 1890, in the middle of that new arrangement. It is a large canvas for him, nearly a metre across, and by this point the orders were arriving faster than an old man could paint them.