Eugène Boudin was the son of a mariner, and he spent the majority of his career on the coast in Normandy. As noted by art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary (1830-1889), "M. Boudin has made the Norman coast his specialty. He has even invented a genre of marine that belongs only to him and which consists of painting, as well as the beach, all the beautiful exotic society that foregathers in the summer in our seaside towns (G. Jean-Aubry, Eugène Boudin. Greenwich, 1968, p. 232)." Boudin's detailed landscapes to which Castagnary refers are most often filled with men and women in fashionable contemporary dress, participating in a variety of leisure-time activities. These fancily dressed figures were often accompanied by their pets, and Boudin commonly included spaniels, terriers, and hounds in the foregrounds of these compositions. Perhaps this watercolor was made in preparation for such a detail. A similar spaniel (though in an opposite direction), with a spotted back side and raised head, is seen in the foreground of On Deauville Beach of 1864 in a private collection (Aubry 1968, p. 43).
Inscribed at lower right, "E.B.".
McCrindle, Joseph F., former owner.