Boudin often worked at Trouville on the Normandy coast. He painted hundreds of small beach scenes showing the elegant summer visitors to this fashionable seaside resort. These small beach scenes sold well and they are what he is famous for today. This is one of his earliest paintings of the subject. Boudin had a marvellous ability as an observer and recorder of nature – here he captures the gestures, movements and costumes of the individual figures with astonishing accuracy. At their best, as here, Boudin's beach scenes vibrate with subtle nuances of light, colour, shade and movement, tiny and hasty specks of pure colour simultaneously dramatizing the surface and bringing the whole into harmony. Boudin was one of the most important precursors of Impressionism.