This painting by Eugène Boudin, a Norman painter and Claude Monet’s teacher, exemplifies the artist’s signature style and subject matter in the 1860s. Monet would later follow Boudin’s practice of painting in the open air, the technique that gave this image of a beach for middle-class vacationers its vivid spontaneity and atmospheric light. This practice would be particularly important for Monet and his contemporaries, who came to be known as the Impressionists.
Eugène-Louis Boudin painted many beach scenes at the fashionable tourist spots of Trouville and Deauville in Normandy. In them we see the life of the Paris boulevards translated to the seashore. Bathing attire being still relatively rare, people wore the same clothes at the beach as they did in the city and made the same round of promenades, visits, and dinners. The huts on wheels are portable changing machines that were pulled into the water so that bathers could change without fear of exposure.
Date
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Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection
Reference Number
1938.1276
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Carlyle Burrows, “A Loan Exhibition of Fifty Painters,” New York Herald Tribune (July 31, 1938), ill.
“Art Shows at Summer Resorts,” Town and Country (August 1938), ill.
Interior Design and Decoration, August 1938, ill.
“Newport Holiday: 50 Famous French and American Painters Make a Midsummer Display,” Art News vol. 36, pt. 2 (August 13, 1938), p.11 (ill.).
“‘Fifty Famous’ Meet in Newport Show,” Art Digest vol. 12 (August 1, 1938), p. 18, (ill.).
Dorothy Odenheimer, “Boudin, Forerunner of Impressionism,” The Art Institute Bulletin, vol. 33, 1939, pp. 79 (ill.), 80.
The Maynard Walker Gallery, 1946, np (ill.).
The Art Institute of Chicago, A Brief Guide to the Collections, 1956, pp. 32 (ill.), 33-34.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in The Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection, (Chicago, 1961), p. 29.
John Maxon, The Art Institute of Chicago (New York, 1970), pp. 78 (ill.).
Diane Kelder, The Great Book of French Impressionism (New York, 1980), (ill.).
Richard R. Brettell, French Salon Artists 1800-1900 (Chicago, New York, 1986), pp. 48 (ill. det), 49, 52 (ill.), 117.
Vivien Hamilton, Boudin at Trouville (London, 1992), pp. 60, 72 (ill.), 142, 144.
Robert L. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886 (New Haven, 1994), pp. 14, 18 (fig. 21).
The Age of Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago (New Haven and London, 2008), cat. 10, p. 42 (ill.).
Marco Goldin, ed., Storie dell’Impressionismo: I grandi protagonist da Monet a Renoir da Van Gogh a Gauguin (Linea d’ombre, 2016), 16-17 (detail ill.), 268 (color ill.), 408 cat. 36.
Newport Art Association, R. I., Newport Holiday, August 5–19, 1938, (no cat.) [exhibition organized for the Art Association by Maynard Walker].
San Francisco, The California Palace of the Legion of Honor and The M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, Seven Centuries of Painting: A Loan Exhibition of Old and Modern Masters, December 29, 1939-January 28, 1940, cat. Y104 (ill.).
Manchester, New Hampshire, The Currier Gallery of Art, Monet and the Beginnings of Impressionism: Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition, October 8-November 6, 1949, p. 17, cat. 12.
The Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museum, Boudin at Trouville, November 20, 1992–February 28, 1993, cat. 32; London, The Courtauld Institute Galleries, March 15–May 2, 1993.
Fort Worth, Tex., Kimbell Museum of Art, The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, June 29–November 2, 2008, cat. 10 (ill.).
Treviso, Museo di Santa Caterina, Storie dell’Impressionismo, October 29, 2016-April 17, 2017, cat. 36.
Mrs. Meredith Hare (Elizabeth Sage Goodwin, later Elizabeth Sage Hare, died c. 1949) [according to AIC Bulletin 1939 she had acquired it at a New York Sale]. Maynard Walker Gallery, New York by 1938; purchased by the Art Institute, 1938 using Coburn funds [see minutes from meeting of the Committee on Painting and Sculpture, AIC, October 5, 1938].
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