NARRATOR:
This small painting by Louis-Eugène Boudin beautifully captures the leisure and tranquility of an afternoon at the beach. Fashionable vacationers are lined up on the sand, their parasols sheltering them from the sun. On the left, above a yellow parasol, you can make out the tall sails of a boat gliding by. To the right, near the distant horizon, smoke from a steam ship wafts lazily upward.
Boudin was one of the first painters to work almost exclusively in the open air. The son of a harbor pilot, he had no formal training as an artist. In 1847, after a brief stay in Paris, he returned to his native Normandy and began to paint beach and harbor scenes of great sensibility. His ability to render nature’s subtle fluctuations caught the attention of the popular landscape painter Camille Corot, who called him the “king of skies.” Boudin taught his open-air technique to the young Claude Monet. Later, Monet recalled it as an epiphany:
MONET [ACTOR]:
“Suddenly a veil was torn away. I had understood—I had realized what painting could be.”
Beach at Trouville
1873
Louis-Eugène Boudin (French, 1824-1898)
On View
Boudin was the great painter of Normandy’s beach resorts: the casinos and grand hotels of Trouville and Deauville that sprang into being once the railway reached the sea. Working rapidly and outdoors, he captured vacationing Parisians in changing coastal light. Boudin’s fascination with changeability, whether of fashion or the weather, anticipated the Impressionist movement, inspiring Monet’s and Renoir’s first forays into outdoor painting.
Details
- Artist Name: Louis-Eugène Boudin (French, 1824-1898)
- Title: Beach at Trouville
- Date: 1873
- Medium: Oil on panel
- Dimensions: 8-1/4 x 16-1/4 in. (21.0 x 41.3 cm)
- Credit Line: The Norton Simon Foundation
- Accession Number: F.1968.10.P
- Copyright: © The Norton Simon Foundation
Object Information
[Adolphe Beugniet, Paris].
?Private Collection, Paris.
?Georges Meyer-Heine, Marseille, sold 5 June 1957 to;
[Galerie Alfred Daber, Paris, sold 17 April 1968 to];
[M. Knoedler & Co., New York, stock no. A9243, as Beach Scene, sold 5 June 1968 to];
The Norton Simon Foundation.
?Private Collection, Paris.
?Georges Meyer-Heine, Marseille, sold 5 June 1957 to;
[Galerie Alfred Daber, Paris, sold 17 April 1968 to];
[M. Knoedler & Co., New York, stock no. A9243, as Beach Scene, sold 5 June 1968 to];
The Norton Simon Foundation.
Small Loan Exhibition from the Norton Simon Foundation Collection and the Hunt Museum of Art
- Kansas City, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1968-09 to 1968-12
[on loan]
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1969 to 1972
Three Centuries of French Art: Selections from The Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art and The Norton Simon Foundation_1
- California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1973-05-03 to 1976-06-15
The Lure of the Water: Impressionists at the Seashore
- Norton Simon Museum, 1993-07-01 to 1993-10-10
- Graham, F. Lanier, Three Centuries of French Art, no. 34
- Schmit, Robert, Eugène Boudin 1824-1898, 1973, no. 848, as Scène de plage à Trouville. p. 301
- The French Impressionists in Southern California: Paintings, Sculptures and Prints in Public Collections. A Guidebook and Catalogue, 1984, pp. 17-18
- Masterpieces from the Norton Simon Museum, 1989, p. 134
- Brettell, Richard R. and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, volume 1, 2006,
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 469 p. 301
- Le Foll, Joséphine, L'impressionnisme, 2020, none p. 131, pp. 134-135
- Ritchie, Robert C., The Lure of the Beach, 2021, Figure 7.5 p. 185 (ill.)
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