Trouville Harbour

Long before Parisians came for the beach, Trouville lived off this harbour at the mouth of the river Touques. Until the 1840s the fishing boats simply lay in the riverbed. Then a straight stone quay, 450 metres long, was finished along the river in 1842, a fish market went up on it the following year, and from 1850 a steamer ran daily across the estuary from Le Havre. By 1873, when Boudin painted this panel, a fashionable resort had grown up around that working port, and here he kept to the working side. The horizon sits low. The town and its masts are pressed into a narrow band, and most of the panel, a little under 60 centimetres wide, belongs to a moving sky full of puffs of cloud. The same wind is filling the sails of the boats in and around the harbour.