La playa de Trouville

The railway had been carrying Parisians down to Trouville for some 30 years by the time Boudin painted this stretch of sand, and he had been working on that coast for nearly as long. Brooklyn dates the canvas between 1887 and 1896, which puts him in his sixties. The people on the beach are local. A horse and cart crosses the wet flat sand that in the season carried holidaymakers down from the hotels, and the tide is far out. The painting came to Brooklyn in 1915, in the bequest of the Brooklyn collector Robert B. Woodward.