Beach Scene Trouville by Eugène Boudin was created in 1870 – 1874. The painting is in National Gallery, London. The size of the work is 18,2 x 46,2 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
About the Work
Boudin was born and grew up on the Normandy coast, and it remained his favourite subject. Although he spent winters in Paris and also ventured further afield to Brittany, Belgium, Holland, the south of France and Venice, he was drawn back to the seaside each summer by the quality of the light and the subtle grey and blue harmonies of the sky and sea.
The weather there may have been bracing, but the towns Trouville and Deauville were rapidly developing into smart holiday resorts, with new hotels and villas – whose presence is hinted at in the buildings on the right of this picture. Well-to-do holidaymakers from Paris and further away flocked to Trouville’s wide sandy beach intent on sea bathing, a newly fashionable pursuit that was thought to be good for the health. Boudin found a ready market for his small scenes that chronicled the summer activity on the Normandy coast.
As the critic Castagnary remarked, ‘ Boudin invented a genre. He was the first to think of showing formally dressed Parisians, surrounded by air and sun on stretches of beach where the wind is blowing; this was successful and deserved to be.’ Read more in National Gallery London
About the Artist
Eugène Louis Boudin (12 July 1824 – 8 August 1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores. His pastels, summary and economic, garnered the splendid eulogy of Baudelaire; and Corot called him the “King of the skies”. Read more in Wikipedia
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