Étretat

Étretat was a manufactured attraction by the time Boudin got there. Trains had opened the Normandy coast to Paris from the 1850s, Offenbach kept a villa in the town, Maupassant grew up beside it and set stories on its beach, and in the mid-1880s Monet painted the pierced cliffs so often that they became one of the most repeated views in France. Boudin had spent 30 years painting holiday crowds on the sands at Trouville and Deauville, yet he only began working at Étretat in the autumn of 1890, at 66. This canvas comes from the season after that, and it is big by his standards, well over a metre across. The year after he painted it he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, four decades after he first set up on these beaches.