Station: [9] Eugène Boudin: „Low Tide at Scheveningen Beach“ (1875)

The French painter Eugène Boudin created Low Tide at Scheveningen Beach in 1875 after one of his numerous trips to the Dutch seaside. The painting shows a view across a stretch of dune-lined beach, leaving a narrow strip of shimmering turquoise sea visible. Some fishermen repair their boats and mend nets. From the restaurant embedded between the dunes on the right trippers watch the activities. These are the first signs of what would later become the flourishing tourism at the Dutch seaside. A local woman with her child is moving along a path towards the viewer. Several details such as the rigging and the fishing nets are painted with quick brushstrokes. The upper two thirds of the image are taken up by the sky in which dark clouds gather. The boats’ flags are fluttering loosely in the wind, visualising a breeze accompanying the change in the weather. In his focus on the atmospheric depiction of the sky, which earned the artist the epithet “king of the skies”, as well as in his loose brushwork, Boudin shows himself as a pioneer of Impressionism. He passed on his experience in working directly in front of the subject en plein air to Claude Monet whom he first met on the Normandy coast in 1858.