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1870 was the year the French empire came apart. War with Prussia was declared in July, Napoleon III surrendered at Sedan in September, and by the winter Boudin had packed up and crossed into Belgium, where he stayed until the following August. Monet, his younger friend from Le Havre, went to London instead. Boudin painted this stretch of the Brittany coast in that same year, with none of the bathing huts, parasols and crinolines of the Trouville beach scenes that were paying his bills at the time. He had been going to Brittany since the 1850s and kept returning almost to the end of his life, drawn by weather far greyer and less obliging than anything on the Normandy resorts.