The Beach 1894

Eugène Boudin painted this beach scene, sometime in the mid-19th century, using oil on panel. The paint is applied in loose brushstrokes; Boudin was, after all, an important influence on the Impressionists. But it is the painting’s social content, even more than its facture, that is most interesting. The artist was known for these beach scenes, capturing middle-class Parisians escaping to the seaside. The parasols, the carefully arranged dresses, even the chairs: all speak to a culture of leisure made possible by expanding industrial capitalism. Think of the labor that underpinned this scene – the making of the textiles, the furniture, the railway that brought them all to the coast. And consider, too, Boudin’s own work. Though the painting seems effortless, it is the product of his own practiced hand, a skilled trade in its own right. Ultimately, it is the convergence of all this labor that makes the scene so evocative.