The Inlet at Berck (Pas-de-Calais)

The lower right corner carries the day it was made: E. Boudin, 16 juillet 80. He had turned 56 four days earlier. By that summer Berck, on the Pas-de-Calais coast, was two towns sharing one beach. Fishing families worked their boats straight off the open sand, and since the 1860s Paris had been sending sick children here for the sea cure, to a maritime hospital inaugurated in 1869 with the Empress Eugénie present. Boudin gave the picture to neither of them. He painted the strand itself, the fence posts sunk in the sand, the tufts of sea grass, the plain houses closing off the view. A few figures in dark skirts and white caps cross the middle distance, and the long dark shapes behind them are boats pulled up clear of the water.