Trouville

Boudin sat out the Franco-Prussian war in Antwerp and came back to the Normandy coast in 1871, the summer after the siege of Paris and the Commune. The Walters Art Museum dates this long strip of a canvas, 18 centimetres high and 46 across, to that September, with the Trouville season under way again as though the previous twelve months had not happened. He had little patience with the crowd he was painting. In 1867 he called this sort of holidaymaker a parasite and the whole spectacle a disgusting masquerade. He went on painting it for the rest of his life, and Henry Walters bought this one in 1910.