Eugène Boudin, Beach at Trouville

Boudin was born and grew up on the Normandy coast, and although he spent winters in Paris he returned to the area each year, retaining a lasting affection for its bracing climate and expansive seascapes. He is best remembered today for his pictures of crowds of affluent holidaymakers on the beaches of Trouville and Deauville, painted in the 1860s. In this much later freely painted oil sketch, however, the mood is bleak rather than festive. It was traditionally called A Squall from the West, and the breezes that cause the flags to flutter and crinolines to lift in the earlier beach scenes have given way to more menacing gusts of wind. Dark clouds have gathered in the sky and a torrential downpour has started, threatening the boats sketched in on the horizon. The beach is almost deserted. In place of the fashionably dressed figures of the 1860s a few strokes of black and red paint suggest children playing in the sand watched over by a man in grey.

In 1890, towards the end of his career, Boudin wrote: ‘I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky,’ acknowledging his lifelong obsession with fleeting weather effects. Thirty years before he made this oil sketch he had created a series of informal pastel studies of skies over the Le Havre estuary, which were praised by the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire as ‘meteorological beauties’. Baudelaire remarked that just by looking at them it would have been possible to guess the time of day, season and wind direction. This sketch, which Boudin perhaps painted on the spot, also seems to record a specific moment. The date – 7 April – is noted in the lower right-hand corner.

In 1865 and 1866 Boudin had spent some time painting on the Channel coast alongside his friend Gustave Courbet, who also admired Boudin’s observation of changing skies. Courbet produced a number of canvases of deserted beaches, including Beach Scene, which probably shows the shore of Lac Leman in Switzerland beneath heavy clouds, perhaps echoing Boudin’s seascapes.