Washerwomen on the Beach of Etretat

By 1894 the cliffs at Etretat, on the Normandy coast, were famous. Monet had painted their great stone arch again and again, and summer visitors came by train to see the view for themselves. Boudin, a Norman himself and by then about 70, stood on the same beach and looked the other way, down at the washerwomen bent over their laundry at the water's edge. You cannot make out a single face. They are shapes at work, dark against the wet sand, while the wide Normandy sky he was known for painting fills the top of the picture. He made it four years before his death, in oil on a small wooden panel. It passed through a Paris sale in 1900 and eventually to a collector in the United States, which is how a quiet Normandy morning ended up in Washington.