The Beach at Trouville

By 1873 Trouville had stopped being a fishing village. The railway reached it in 1860, and within a few years the Normandy sands filled every summer with Parisians in their best clothes, drawn by the new hotels, the casino and the racecourse. Boudin set up his easel right among them and painted what he saw, the parasols and wide skirts, the flags snapping in the sea wind. He once wrote that these little ladies on the beach held a vein of gold for him, and the small scenes did sell well. Look how little of the panel is sand. Most of it is sky, pale and shifting, the thing Boudin painted better than almost anyone. The older landscape painter Corot called him the king of skies.