Mujeres en la playa de Berck

Boudin is the painter who, years earlier, had talked a teenaged Monet into carrying his paints outdoors and working straight from what he saw, advice that helped set Impressionism in motion. By 1881, when he made this small panel, the younger men had run far ahead with the idea, and Boudin was following the coast in his fifties, still painting the sea and sky he loved. Berck was a fishing town in the north, and the figures here are not the parasol-and-crinoline holidaymakers of his famous Deauville scenes. They are local working women on the sand, roughed in with a few quick touches under the wide grey light of the Channel. Corot called him the king of skies, and it is the sky, not the women, that fills most of this little picture.