Princess Pauline Metternich (1836–1921) on the Beach

By the 1860s the Normandy coast at Trouville had become the summer stage for fashionable Paris, reachable on the new railways, and Eugene Boudin made his name painting the crowds who came to take the sea air in their finest clothes. This small study on cardboard shows one of the most watched women of the Second Empire: Pauline Metternich, wife of the Austrian ambassador to Napoleon III and a friend of the Empress Eugenie, known for her wit and her daring sense of style. Boudin catches her from behind and to one side, a quick figure against sand and sky rather than a posed portrait. He was among the first French painters to work outdoors like this, and a young Claude Monet picked up the habit watching him on these same beaches.