Boudin did not completely abandon Trouville and worked there regularly between 1875 and 1897. The painting in the A. G. Leventis Collection, precisely dated to 1889, was an opportunity for him to return to the beach at Trouville and to elaborate, by his own admission, a particularly ambitious tableau. The painter adopted a slightly elevated point of view by placing his easel on the pier above the estuary of the River Touques, which separates Trouville from Deauville. The elegant hotels and villas by the beach, like the holidaymakers with their parasols on the shore, conjured up by miniscule touches which are yet so expressive, are still present, as they are in the earlier paintings, but are now subject to the scale of the panorama of the coast and the immense sky, subordinated to the description of the site with its evocation, on the horizon, of the environs of the port of Le Havre, with its grey smoke. Reinvented, the painter’s vision lost nothing of its freshness and visual acuity; his touch, consistently light and animated from one end of the canvas to the other, confers its rhythm to the composition.
Inscribed, signed and dated: Trouville / E.Boudin 89 (bottom right)
PROVENANCE: Bought on 31 October 1889 from the artist by Pieter van der Velde (d 1922), Le Havre; sold by Mme van der Velde to M. Wallis, 1922; Wallis and Sons, London; Gaston Megret, London; Germain Seligmann, Paris; Jacques Seligmann, new York; Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London; Lord Sieff of Brimpton; sale, Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture, Sotheby’s, London, 26 April 1967, lot 17, illus.
EXHIBITIONS: Tate Gallery, London, 1927-1929 (loan); French Art, 1200-1900, Royal Academy, London, January-March 1932, cat. no. 474; Eugène Boudin: Retrospective Exhibition in Aid of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London, November-December 1958, no. 55, illus.; A Great Period of French Painting, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London, June-July 1963, no. 4, illus.; Athens 2012; Le cercle de l’art moderne. Collectionneurs d’avant-garde au Havre, Musée du Luxembourg (Sénat), Paris, 19 September 2012 – 6 January 2013, cat. no. 36, illus.
LITERATURE: Royal Academy, Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of French Art, 1200-1900, London 1932, no. 275, pl. 116; r. L. Benjamin, Eugène Boudin, New York 1937, p. 189; Robert Schmit, Eugène Boudin, 1824-1898. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint, Vol. 3, Paris 1973, no. 2543, illus.; NG 2012, pp. 31, 208, illus.: p. 55; Géraldine Lefèvre, ‘Pieter van der Velde (1848-1922)’, in Le cercle de l’art moderne. Collectionneurs d’avant-garde au Havre, exh. cat., Paris: Musée du Luxembourg (Sénat), 2012, p. 98.
