The Beach

Eugène Boudin

National Gallery of Art

A row of about a dozen men and women sit, stand, or stroll along a sandy beach beneath a pale blue sky in this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is loosely painted so many of the facial features and other details are indistinct. The women wear dresses with long sleeves and skirts in shades of charcoal gray, parchment brown, vivid red, sapphire blue, or white. Five of them shade themselves with black parasols, and a woman to the right uses a white parasol with a topaz-blue interior. The men wear dark suits and straw-yellow hats. Another group of people clustered closer to the water to the right are even more loosely painted. A few people seem to wade out into the water, and dark smudges near the horizon suggest sailboats and one steamer. The horizon comes about two-thirds of the way up this composition, and the water and sky are similar tones of muted, ice blue. The artist signed the lower left corner, “E. Boudin.”