The Beach at Trouville

Boudin had been painting this beach since 1862, when the fashionable Paris crowd still came down for the season in crinolines and the Duc de Morny was building Deauville next door. By 1879 the empire that made Trouville was nine years gone, the clothes had changed, and Boudin was still there working the same strip of sand. He painted these things small and fast, outdoors, and this one is barely a hand's width tall, most of it sky. Corot called him the king of skies. Boudin had a habit of writing the date, the hour and the wind on the back of his studies, so that he would know later exactly what weather he had been standing in.