The Beach at Villerville

Eugène Boudin

National Gallery of Art

About three dozen men and women sit, stand, or stroll along a sandy beach beneath a sunset-streaked sky in this horizontal landscape painting. The people are small in scale within the landscape, taking up about a quarter of the canvas's height. The scene is loosely painted so many of the facial features are indistinct, but the faces we can see have pale or olive-toned skin. The area closest to us is a strip of sand, and, a short distance away, a brown and white dog sits facing away from us to our left of center. The women all wear dresses with long sleeves, tight bodices, and ankle-length hoop skirts in shades of baby blue, smoke gray, butter yellow, chocolate brown, crimson red, black, or white. Some wear jackets, capes, or shawls, and veils flutter off some of their hats and bonnets. The men wear suits with long tails and rounded hats. Most of the people sit in wooden chairs, and a few stand or walk along the beach. The walking women carrying long sticks or canes. Smudges of ruby red, slate blue, and a touch of straw yellow could be the form of a child crouching in the sand, to our left. Two ladderback chairs sit near the crowd to our right. The horizon comes less than a quarter of the way up the composition. Thin screens of pale gray clouds above are touched on the undersides with petal pink, and they break to show peeks of soft yellow along the horizon and topaz blue a bit higher up.