Bathing Time at Deauville

Eugène Boudin

National Gallery of Art

About two dozen men and women sit in straight-backed, wooden chairs gathered along a sandy expanse around pockets of water under a slate-blue sky that fills the top two-thirds of this horizontal landscape painting. Most of the people sit with their backs to us but the faces we can see suggest they all have light skin. The people gather in a loose crowd that crosses the left two-thirds of the composition. The women wear dark hats and long dresses with full skirts, their shoulders wrapped in shawls in black, red, dark yellow, or cream white. The men also wear hats, most of them black bowler hats, and suits in black or pecan brown. A few women hold up blue parasols in harvest gold, slate blue, teal, or gray. Two women and a man sit on the sand to the right. Three changing huts stand behind the group across the left half, and two brown horses stand at the water’s edge nearby. Three poles march into the distance to the right near where more people gather across a pocket of water. The artist signed and dated the lower right corner, “E. Boudin – 65.”