The Beach at Deauville

Deauville did not exist when Boudin was young. From 1860 the Duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III, had a stretch of Normandy marsh drained and built up into a resort for Parisians, and the thing took about four years, with a railway station opening in 1863 and a long boardwalk laid along the sand. Boudin painted this in 1864, so the crowd here is sitting on ground that had been swamp within living memory, dressed for the boulevard. A chair lies overturned in the foreground, as though the wind took it or whoever had it left in a hurry. He went back to these Normandy beaches for the next 30 years.