Trouville, Scène de plage

Boudin declared in a letter to his brother in 1865, "I shall do other things, but I will always be the painter of beaches" (quoted in G. Jean-Aubry, Eugène Boudin, d'après des documents inédits, Paris, 1922, p. 62). In his painting of 1873, Trouville, Scène de plage, Boudin demonstrates his fluency in his signature subject. A flock of fashionable women huddle together on the beach in Brittany, insulating themselves from wind and sand. Charcoal clouds gather in the pale blue sky overhead, suggesting that a summer rainstorm is imminent. Beyond the women on the shore, Boudin offers a glimpse of the the agitated, pale green sea.
In addition to the canonical subject matter, the present work also displays Boudin's distinctive brushwork: quick, confident licks of paint that capture the ephemeral visual effects of the coastal atmosphere. Boudin conveyed both the frothy, churning waves and the material trappings of bourgeois femininity—bustles, ribbons, hats, parasols—with just a few deft brushstrokes. This evocative quality of his work impressed Charles Baudelaire at the Salon of 1859; the poet and art critic wrote of Boudin's work at that exhibition, "These astonishing studies—so rapidly and so faithfully sketched after...waves and clouds—always bear, written in the margins, the date, the hour and the wind" (quoted in H. Siegel, Painting with Monet, Princeton, 2024, p. 77). In this sense, Boudin is an important precursor to other Impressionist and Modern painters of the sea, such as Edouard Manet and Claude Monet.