트루빌 해변의 풍경

The crowd in this picture arrived by train. The line from Paris reached Trouville in 1863, and within a couple of years the Normandy fishing town had become the place where the capital's comfortable classes spent August, sitting out on the sand fully dressed, in crinolines and under parasols.

Boudin had been painting them since 1862 and was uneasy about doing it. In a letter of 1868 he defended himself, asking whether these bourgeois strolling towards the sunset had any less right to be fixed on canvas than the peasants other painters preferred.

He knew the coast from the other side of it. His father was a Honfleur sailor, and a few years before this he had spotted the caricatures of a Le Havre teenager displayed in a framer's window, sought the boy out and talked him into painting outdoors. That was Monet.