Eugène Boudin, The Beach at Tourgéville-les-Sablons

The Normandy village of Tourgéville is about two miles inland, but on the coast, between Deauville and Benerville, lies Tourgéville-les-Sablons with its extensive beach. Here, the two jetties at the mouth of the river Touques, which form an entrance to the harbour of Trouville-Deauville, can be seen in the middle distance, to the left of the chalk cliffs. Boudin had painted the jetties from another angle in The Entrance to Trouville Harbour.

Boudin produced The Beach at Tourgéville-les-Sablons in 1893, towards the end of his life, when he was still painting daily despite ill-health. He was certainly prolific: between 1862 and 1895 he produced more than 300 paintings of fashionable holidaymakers on the beaches of Trouville or Deauville. Unlike his earlier paintings of Normandy beaches filled with smart crowds, such as Beach Scene, Trouville, in this airy panoramic view the beach is quite sparsely populated. With a few deft strokes of the brush Boudin has delineated the small groups of figures strolling along the great sweep of sand or sitting by the grass-covered dunes and the ships and steamers plying their way through waves on the horizon. But it is nature and the vast expanse of sky, filled with scudding clouds, that dominates the composition.

Writing over 30 years earlier, the poet and critic Baudelaire, who had seen Boudin’s pastel studies of weather effects, had commented that his observations of meteorological conditions were so precise that you could almost tell the time of day and the season by them. Boudin seems to have been chiefly interested here in capturing the freshness of the sea air and the particular quality of light.