Provenance
Denise Yvonne Adelina Marie Thibaud
Thence by descent to Adeline Thibaud
Catalogue note
In the early 1880s, Albert Aublet painted a series of plein air studies on the beach at Tréport, a busy port and popular seaside town on the Normandy coast. A railway station, opened in 1872, provided direct access from Paris, and attracted Parisians on holiday.
Aublet’s beach studies were always executed on small, wooden panels, easily transportable in his paintings supply box, and like our oil sketch, characterized by rapid, almost abstract, colorful brushwork. These spontaneous plein air sketches would culminate in Aublet’s large-scale (101 by 161 cm.) Salon painting of 1885 (fig. 1). When viewed side-by-side, details of our painting become immediately identifiable, as so accurately and colorfully described by the British artist and writer, Frank Emanuel in his 1901 commentary on Tréport for The Studio. “If you were [a figure painter], you would see on this lively fluttering beach, subjects innumerable. First, watch the little tête-à-têtes in the tents, and then that wonderful stream of humanity in bathing costumes, swathed in flowing white togas, pushing its way through a quizzing crowd up and down the planks to and from the sea. Then the bathing itself – why, the sea is all a-bob and a-splutter with rotund men and coquettish dames.” (Frank Emanuel, The Studio, 1901, vol. 23, p. 96).