Ferdinand Heilbuth (1829-1889) Crinolines On The Beach Of Trouville - Calvados Normandy

Ferdinand HEILBUTH
(Hamburg, 1829 – Paris, 1889)
Crinolines on the beach at Trouville (Calvados)
Oil on panel
H. 13 cm; W. 22 cm
Signed lower right
Around 1880

Provenance: sale from the artist's studio, lot 77 or lot 130 of the catalogue, respectively titled Beach and Seaside

Trained in Munich, then in Paris in the studios of Delaroche and Gleyre, Heilbuth painted genre and history subjects for around ten years, which he exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1853. Then, in the second part of his career, he settled in Rome, with an appetite for the intimate life of the Vatican that earned him the nickname "The painter of the cardinals". Having settled permanently in France after a few years of exile in London, due to the war of 1870, the artist now devoted himself to scenes of regattas and boating on the banks of rivers and lakes in the Parisian suburbs (Neuilly, Croissy, Bougival, etc.), featuring elegant women. This was the beginning of the "Belle Epoque" and the golden age of high society stays on the Normandy coast, which Heilbuth rediscovered, probably around 1879-1880, after a first stay in Villerville in 1864. The sale of his studio also includes around fifteen paintings, watercolors and sketches devoted to the Normandy seaside, in particular Villerville and Trouville. This charming little Trouville study, very freely styled, shows us on the right a bit of the Villa Sidonia (or Villa Honoré) built in 1869, on the heights the roofs of the Frémonts manor, frequented by Proust, and on the left the massive silhouette of the Hôtel des Roches Noires, inaugurated in 1866 and painted by Monet in 1870.