オンフルールの浜辺

In April 1886 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel opened a show of close to 300 French pictures in New York, at the American Art Association, and that exhibition is what started American collectors buying Impressionism. Boudin had 23 works in it. He was 62 that year and still painting the coast he had known since he was a boy: he was born in Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine, the son of a harbour pilot. The crowded beach scenes at Trouville and Deauville in the 1860s were what had made his name, and he had shown in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874, while going on sending work to the official Salon. This canvas came to Phoenix in 1964 as a gift from Donald and Sybil Harrington.