Trouville-sur-Mer Boardwalk
— the light Boudin chased.
Not only on a wall.
“A long wooden walk along the Channel coast, across the river from Deauville. The first boardwalk in Normandy when it opened in 1867. The 925-metre line of planks drew the Belle Époque crowds out for the air. Boudin painted these sands again and again, then taught Monet to paint outside, in the wind. The light is still the light he was after: soft, salt-thinned, often grey-pink before the rain. The casino is still there. The fishing boats still come in. It is a slow walk, hands in pockets.
Trouville-sur-Mer Boardwalk, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Trouville-sur-Mer sits on the Côte Fleurie, the Normandy seaside in Calvados department, about two hours northwest of Paris on the English Channel. The town shares the mouth of the Touques river with Deauville, its more famous neighbour, and is reached by direct train from Paris Saint-Lazare to the joint Trouville-Deauville station. Trouville was a working fishing port long before it became a resort, and the harbour still lands fish every morning. The wooden boardwalk, the Promenade des Planches, runs 925 metres along the beach and opened in 1867, the first of its kind on the Normandy coast. Population sits around 4,600, with the town swelling several times over each August.
The light off the Channel at Trouville is the light that taught the Impressionists. Eugène Boudin, born up the coast at Honfleur in 1824, summered at Trouville and made the beach his subject. Of the eleven paintings he showed at the Paris Salon between 1864 and 1869, nine were of this stretch of sand. In 1858 he met a young Claude Monet in Le Havre and pressed on him the importance of painting outdoors, with the wind in the canvas. Monet honeymooned at Trouville in 1870 with his wife Camille and their son Jean, working beside Boudin on the beach. Renoir and Dufy followed. The colour the canvases came back with is the colour the boardwalk still gives, soft and salt-flattened, just before grey.
The boardwalk runs the length of the beach from the Casino Barrière at the southern end to the Roches Noires headland at the north, and the surface is real timber, replaced in panels as it wears. The bathing huts still stripe the sand in summer. Five minutes south, the bridge over the Touques crosses into Deauville; a small foot-passenger ferry runs the same crossing when the tide is in. The Musée Villa Montebello, the town museum, holds works by Boudin and period photographs of the resort years. Direct trains from Paris Saint-Lazare take just over two hours. High season is May through September; out of season the boardwalk belongs to dog-walkers, fishermen, and the wind, and that is when the light goes back to being Boudin's.