Beach Scene, Trouville

The skill at seizing the ephemeral and noting essentials characterize the views of Trouville painted by Boudin. Trouville was a fashionable resort under the Second Empire.

Boudin, the son of a Honfleur sailor, spent most of his life in seaside towns and concentrated on painting landscapes by the sea, everyday coastal scenes. The tradition he was following was primarily an English one, though Boudin did not paint ships at sea. The pictures he painted over the years in his loose, sketchy way did not, strictly speaking, possess any central subjects. Even his market or beach scenes present an extensive panorama of colour and economically deployed line accentuation. The atmosphere is bright, moist and highly sensitively registered. Corot in old age dubbed Boudin “the king of the skies.”