Eugène Louis Boudin - Trouville - Walters 37840

From the early 1860s, Boudin depicted elegant tourists on the Normandy coast. Trouville had recently been established as a fashionable summer resort with its own casino and luxury hotels. Boudin's attitude toward his subjects was not necessarily sympathetic, and in 1867, he described such scenes of upper-class enjoyment as "a disgusting masquerade" and his subjects as "ghastly parasites." This particular scene may have been painted in September 1871, after he had returned from Antwerp, where he had sought refuge during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.