La Jetée de Trouville : coucher de soleil

1862 was the summer Trouville turned into something else. The railway had brought Paris within reach of the Normandy coast, sea bathing had become fashionable in part on the example of the Empress Eugenie, and the Duc de Morny was building the rival resort of Deauville across the river. That was the year Boudin began painting the visitors on the sand, the crinoline pictures that fed him for the next 30 years.

The same summer at Trouville he met the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, and took from him a looser, quicker way of laying on paint and a brighter range of colour.

This canvas looks away from the crowd. The jetty runs out into a low evening sky, on a strip of canvas 26 centimetres high and nearly twice as wide, so most of it is weather. It has been in the Ashmolean in Oxford since 1937.