The Beach at Trouville

In July 1863 the railway from Paris reached the Normandy coast at Trouville, and a fishing town became a summer address for Parisians. Boudin painted those holiday crowds year after year, and in 1868 he defended the habit in a letter. Peasants had their painters, he wrote, so didn't the bourgeois strolling on the jetty at sunset also have the right to be put on canvas? This scene comes from the following summer. It is painted on a small wooden panel, barely 37 centimetres wide, the kind he took to the beach because it didn't sway in the wind the way a canvas did. Fashionable women in green, yellow and red gather under two parasols, a bathing hut stands on the right, and a few swimmers are out in the surf. A year later France was at war with Prussia, and the empire of Napoleon III, whose half-brother had built the new resort of Deauville just across the river, was gone within weeks. In the lower right corner, beside his signature, Boudin added the date, 69.