Vacationers on the Beach at Trouville

Along the wide sands of Trouville, Eugène Boudin gathers a whole crowd of French holidaymakers into one lively scene. Painted in 1880, this beach view shows women in full skirts, men bundled in dark coats, and a lone rider guiding his horse through the throng. The figures are tiny and painted with quick, loose strokes, more like shorthand than careful portraits, but that hardly matters. The bustle of a fashionable seaside day still comes through, right down to the little umbrellas and the sense of chatter drifting on the salty breeze.

The sky, though, is the real star. Boudin loved clouds so much that fellow painter Camille Corot called him "the king of the skies," and here more than half the canvas belongs to a soft gray heaven, thick with the damp weather of the Normandy coast. Boudin devoted much of his life to these open beaches and wide horizons, and his habit of painting outdoors rubbed off on a young Claude Monet, whom he mentored and pushed to work in the open air. This humble stretch of sand, in other words, sits quietly at the doorstep of Impressionism.