La plage de Trouville

The son of a mariner, Boudin worked as a cabin boy on his father's ship. This early experience with confronting the changing moods of the sea became a formative part of his artistic career. The current painting belongs to his most famous and popular series of beaches at Deauville and Trouville. The painter's interest in capturing the richly subtle mutability of the sea, and the elaborate leisure activities of those who frequent its shores, was also shared by the generation of artists who would become the Impressionists. Boudin's subtle innovations within such a pleasing plein-air genre secured his artistic reputation. His rapid, almost sketch-like treatment of sky, water, and figures anticipates the spontaneous brushstroke and sensitivity for shifting color tonalities and weather effects that the Impressionists would display.

As a young man in 1847 Boudin had traveled to Paris in order to become a painter. There, he studied 17th century Dutch marine subjects and landscapes, as well as paintings from the Barbizon school. He experienced early success, and was granted scholarships that allowed him to voyage around the country. Annual travel became a pattern for Boudin. It consistently refreshed his subject matter and also widened his social circle, bringing him into contact with his unofficial pupil Claude Monet, as well as Camille Corot, and another great master of the seascape, Gustave Courbet. He exhibited in the Salons from 1863 to 1897, but in an inclusion that points to his influence on younger artists, he was also represented in the first Impressionist Exhibition of 1874.