Trouville-Deauville – Low Tide

Boudin painted this in 1897, near the very end of his life. He was 73 and would die the next year, still doing what he had done for decades: standing on the Normandy sand, painting the sky and the sea. Trouville and Deauville, the two towns in the title, had been open fields a generation earlier. When the railway from Paris reached the coast in the 1860s, the beaches filled almost overnight with casinos, grand hotels and fashionable crowds down from the city, and Boudin became their painter. It was on beaches like these that he had once taken a teenaged Claude Monet and pushed him to work outdoors, in front of the real light. Corot called Boudin the king of the skies, and you can see why here, where the sky fills most of the canvas. This is low tide, the sea pulled far back, leaving a wide sheet of wet sand that catches the same soft grey light as the clouds above. No elegant crowds this time, just the emptied beach and the weather, the thing he had watched more closely than almost anyone.