Approaching Storm

Dark cloud piles up over the Norman beach at Trouville, driving the middle-class bathers and their wheeled bathing machines toward the shore as the first gusts ruffle the water and the light breaks through along the horizon. Eugène-Louis Boudin, the painter who first persuaded the young Monet to work in the open air, made the panel in 1864, at the height of his years on the Channel coast, and it shows the signature of his beach scenes: the holiday crowd in the fashions of the day, the portable changing huts drawn up on the sand, and above all the immense, changing sky that earned him the nickname “king of the skies.” The Art Institute purchased the panel in 1938 with funds from the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.