투크 강변의 세탁부 여인들

The Touques is a short Normandy river that reaches the sea between Trouville and Deauville, and by the 1890s those two towns were where fashionable Paris spent August. Boudin had been painting that crowd on the sand since the 1860s. This picture has its back to it. A few hundred metres up the river the washing was still being done by hand, by women kneeling at the water's edge, and he went on painting them there for nearly 20 years.

The panel is small, about 27 by 41 centimetres, wood rather than canvas, the kind of support he could hold on his knee and finish at a sitting. He was 70 in 1894, by then working the Normandy coast in summer and the Mediterranean in winter. The washerwomen on the Touques first appear in his work in 1878 and the last of them is dated 1896, two years before he died.