Le Port de Trouville

In February 1883 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel gave Boudin his first solo exhibition in Paris, 150 paintings plus pastels and watercolours in his rooms on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. Boudin was 58. Two years earlier the same dealer had bought out his entire stock, and for the first time in his life he was properly sold. He painted this harbour that year.

Trouville had two faces. One was the beach, the holidaymakers under parasols who made his name. The other is this one, the working port. In the 1870s about 800 men fished out of the town, using around 75 large boats and a crowd of smaller ones, and the basin they lay in had been cut by the Duc de Morny, the half-brother of Napoleon III who turned this coast into a resort.

Boudin worked those quays every season for the rest of his life. In 1893 he wrote that the sailing boats had deserted the little port, that he had not seen one in two months, and that their slow disappearance would make the seascape monotonous.