Trouville, el puerto

Boudin made his name on the sands at Trouville, painting the Paris holiday crowd in crinolines under an enormous Normandy sky. By 1886 he was living on the other side of the river mouth. Two years earlier he had built himself a house at Deauville, across the Touques from Trouville, and he spent every summer of his last 14 years there.

The subject moved with him, from the beach to the working basin behind it, with its masts, hulls and tidal mud.

That decade was also when the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel took him up and started giving him one-man shows in Paris. In 1893 Boudin wrote about finishing a season at Trouville and finding the little port abandoned by the sailing boats, which were already growing scarce.