The Beach at Deauville

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.