Le Parc Cordier à Trouville

Boudin is the painter who stands just behind the Impressionists, a generation older, a Normandy man who, in the 1850s, talked a teenage Monet out of drawing cartoons and onto the beach to paint in the open air. He is best known for those beaches and his huge, shifting skies, which is why this shaded park is a quieter side of him. Trouville, on the Normandy coast, had turned in a few decades from a fishing village into one of France's smart seaside resorts, reachable from Paris by the new railway, and the Parc Cordier was a genteel place to stroll away from the sand. Boudin painted it around 1880, keeping what he was famous for even under the trees: a soft, moving light coming down through the leaf canopy onto the small figures taking their walk.