Boudin, Eugène (1824-1898)
La Plage à Trouville (Beach at Trouville)
1888
Oil on panel, 14.3 x 23.8 cm
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Boudin’s beach scenes provide a charming record of resort fashion through the decades. Here the wide crinolines of the 1860s and early 1870s have given way to the more severe, bustled silhouettes of about 1880. Little girls wear pinafores and short skirts rather than miniature versions of their mothers’ attire. An ability to capture with a few brief strokes such nuances of status and style made Boudin enduringly popular with the middle-class Parisians he painted. (Norton Simon)