The Beach near Trouville

The Trouville that Boudin painted here in 1865 had only just become a fashionable place. A generation earlier it was a fishing village on the Normandy coast; then the Paris crowd discovered it, and by the mid-1860s the summer beach filled with the elite of Napoleon III's Second Empire. The museum that owns the picture names two of the small figures on the sand: the man in the bowler hat at the left is a Baron de Rothschild, and the seated woman in white beneath a parasol is the Empress Eugénie. Boudin keeps the horizon low and gives the upper half of the canvas to the Channel sky, so the most powerful people in France stand about as bright little marks under it.