Claude Monet - Boudin, Eugène, The Beach at Trouville, 1865

Boudin took Claude Monet under his wing in the 1850s, when the aspiring artist was still in his teens. Monet came to embrace the older painter’s primary artistic concerns, which included a fascination with the transience of visual sensation and the effects of light and weather on the landscape. He also taught the young man to value everyday scenes of French life and leisure. Boudin was among the first artists to capture in oils that novel, yet prosaic, nineteenth-century pastime, the beach vacation. Such excursions were made possible by the new railway lines, which first reached the northern coast of France, where this scene was painted, in the late 1840s.