Blanchisseuse près de Trouville

Trouville in these years was where Paris went to the sea. The railway had reached the Normandy coast in the 1860s, the fashionable crowd of the Second Empire followed it, and Boudin made his name painting those visitors standing about on the sand in crinolines with their backs to the water. This small panel looks the other way. A washerwoman works at the edge of the water on a stretch of coast the resort has not taken over. Corot had nicknamed Boudin the king of skies, and weather is what these little boards are really recording, several in a day as the light moved. It is oil on wood, about 27 by 41 centimetres, and the National Gallery dates it to somewhere between 1872 and 1876.