Trouville, scène de plage

Eugene Boudin found his subject on the sands of Trouville, a Normandy resort the new railways had filled with well-dressed Parisians down for the sea air. Rather than the bathers, he painted the crowd that came to be seen, women in wide skirts grouped near a flagpole, faces barely indicated, the whole line of them set against a broad sky he loved more than anything else in a picture. He painted these scenes for years, and this one dates to 1872, just after the war with Prussia. It was Boudin who, a decade earlier, had coaxed the teenaged Monet out of the studio to paint in the open air.