Riva della Normandia

Courbet came to the Normandy coast in the mid-1860s and found a subject he had barely touched before, open sea and sky with almost nothing else in them. The older painter Eugene Boudin, who had grown up on this shore at Honfleur, had shown him how much a stretch of water and weather could carry on its own. Across 1865 and 1866 Courbet turned out seascape after seascape at Trouville and Deauville, working fast in the salt air. Here the horizon sits low and nearly the whole canvas is given over to the movement of the water and the light on it, the paint often dragged on thick with a palette knife rather than laid with a brush.