Trouville. Scena di spiaggia

Boudin sat out the Franco-Prussian War abroad, in Brussels and Antwerp. While he was away the Second Empire that had built the Normandy beach resorts collapsed, Paris was besieged and then torn apart by the Commune uprising in the spring of 1871, and the fashionable summer crowd he had been painting at Trouville since the early 1860s stopped coming. He went back that year and returned to the same stretch of sand.

He worked there outdoors on small panels, holding the horizon low so that most of the surface went to the Channel sky, which was the part he cared about. This one is an unusual shape even for him, about 19 centimetres tall and nearly half a metre across, so the figures sit in a thin band with all that weather piled above them.