- Artist
- Eugène Boudin
- Year
- 1864
- Medium
- oil on wood panel
- Dimensions
- Framed: 45.7 x 36.8 x 3.5 cm (18 x 14 1/2 x 1 3/8 in.); Unframed: 34.7 x 26 cm (13 11/16 x 10 1/4 in.)
Fashionable bathers and strollers in crinolines and top hats gather on the pale sands of Deauville beneath a sky of luminous grey clouds. Eugène Boudin — “king of the skies”, as Corot called him — painted this breezy beach scene in 1864, filling the horizon with the soft, silvery light of the Normandy coast. The wind-whipped dresses, the distant sails and the wide-open air make it an early hymn to plein-air painting, the very world the Impressionists would inherit.