Rajada de vento diante de Frascati, Le Havre

Boudin was past 70 when he painted this, and he had been working the same stretch of beach at Le Havre for more than 30 years. Frascati was the bathing establishment there, the fashionable end of the sands where in the 1860s he had made his name painting holidaymakers in crinolines sitting out in rows. Here the crowd is gone. The wind is up, a flag stands straight out from its mast, fishermen are dragging boats clear of the water past the bathing cabins, and the horizon sits so low that most of the canvas is weather. The City of Paris bought it off the wall of the Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which is why a Le Havre beach hangs in the Petit Palais. Boudin died two years later at Deauville, across the Seine estuary from the town he grew up in.