Eugène Boudin was one of the first French landscape artists to take his easel out of the studio. He painted along the coastlines of Normandy, Brittany, and Hauts-de-France, where it had become fashionable for the Parisian middle classes to escape to in the mid 1800s.

Working closely beside his young protégé Claude Monet, Boudin’s radical en plein air technique is celebrated as a pivotal precursor to the Impressionist movement, with whom Boudin exhibited at the group’s first show in 1874. Monet claimed later in life that, “If I have become a painter, I owe it to Eugène Boudin”.

‘Scène de plage’ is characteristic of the landscapes that defined Boudin’s career. Celebrated for his ability to capture the powerful changing conditions of the seashore, Camille Corot once crowned him “the king of skies”. In the present work, the sky is transforming from grey to blue with the clouds pushing across it. Taking up over half the canvas, nature is the focus, with the figures seated on the sand watching the boats come in.

A true master of depicting the turbulence of nature, Boudin’s works are now in the collections of many major international institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington (‘Return of the Terre-Neuvier’, 1875), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (‘On the Beach at Trouville’, 1863), The National Gallery, London (‘The Beach at Tourgéville-les-Sablons’, 1893) and Musée d’Orsay, Paris (‘La Plage de Trouville’, 1864)