Concerto no cassino de Deauville

Five years before Boudin painted this, Deauville did not exist. The duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and one of the sharpest speculators of the Second Empire, bought the marshland across the river from Trouville in 1860 and had a whole resort built on it, with a racecourse, a casino, a church, a boardwalk and a railway from Paris that opened in 1863. The crowd Boudin shows standing about while the band plays outside the casino had come down on that line, in season, in their good clothes. Morny himself died in March 1865, the same year Boudin sent this picture to the Salon in Paris, where it hung as number 252.