Vacationers on the Beach at Trouville

This is one of Eugène Boudin's many paintings of the Normandy coast in northern France. Around 1862 Boudin began working at Trouville, a summer resort served by the new train lines from Paris. There, well-to-do city dwellers enjoyed a new type of vacation: the beach holiday. Some people actually swam (wearing the daring new bathing costumes), but many gathered just to enjoy the sea air and socialize. Boudin's beach scenes, a new subject for painting, sold rapidly to Paris collectors. Most were smaller than this - just the size for Parisian parlors.

This was the first painting purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Art after it opened in 1915.

Credit: The William Hood Dunwoody Fund