Entrance to the Port of Trouville 1894

Eugène Boudin painted this view of the Entrance to the Port of Trouville at an unknown date, using oil on canvas. Boudin was one of the first French artists to paint landscapes ‘en plein air’, outside the studio, and that freedom is evident in the quick brushstrokes that give this painting its feeling of immediacy. Trouville, in Normandy, was transforming into a resort in this period, after the arrival of the railway in 1863, and became a popular destination for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Boudin, however, chooses not to depict fashionable society, but the working port, showing the ships at anchor and the quayside crowded with dockworkers. The French flag flies from the mast of the central ship, asserting France’s maritime power, when the country was still smarting from defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. Art history is concerned with more than just aesthetics. Social and economic changes had as much influence on the subject and style of painting as purely artistic choices did. We can research those changes through census data, trade figures, local newspapers and other archival sources, to better understand the world in which Boudin painted.