Trouville

Boudin painted the beaches of Trouville for more than 30 years, and this is one of the late ones, made in 1891 when he was in his sixties. By then the little Normandy resort had been the playground of fashionable Paris for a generation, and Boudin knew its sands and skies as well as anyone alive. He had been dismissed early on as a mere painter of beaches, yet Corot had called him the king of skies, and younger artists had studied the loose, quick way he caught moving weather. Here the figures are barely more than flecks under a broad grey-blue sky that does most of the work. He kept returning to this coast almost until his death in 1898, painting the same stretch of shore in every season and light.