In the second half of the nineteenth-century Trouville was immensely popular as a seaside resort. It was also Boudin’s most favourite working ground as the site provided him with an inexhaustible source of motifs. Having settled in Paris after his marriage in 1863, he visited Trouville every summer. Most familiar to the public are the beach scenes Boudin painted there, but the other motifs he treated deserve just as much attention. The present work is datable to 1878-82 when Boudin’s talent was in full flowering.

Eugène Boudin was the son of a mariner. As a teenager, he worked for a local printer and after that for a framer, who brought him into contact with the artists Théodule Ribot, Thomas Couture, Jean-François Millet, Constant Troyon and Eugène Isabey. They encouraged him to become a painter. He subsequently went to Paris and studied Dutch old masters as well as the work of the Barbizon painters. He was granted a scholarship in 1851 enabling him to sojourn in Paris, Rouen and Caen. In 1859 the Paris Salon admitted his first painting which was praised by the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. Boudin established important and influential contacts with many artists like the young Claude Monet, whom he recommended working out of doors and directly from nature. He also befriended Gustave Courbet. Boudin came into contact with Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny and furthermore associated with the Impressionists, participating in their first group exhibition in 1874, while also exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon from 1867 to 1897. Boudin travelled outside France, visiting Belgium, The Netherlands and Venice. Normandy and Brittany remained his favourite regions in France. Later the French Riviera became another source of inspiration. From the 1870s onwards, his fame and success increased substantially and during the last decades of his life the Paris dealer, Durand-Ruel, bought all his available paintings and organized numerous exhibitions of his work in Paris, Boston and New York.