This impressionistic work shows fishing boats drawn up on the shore at Trouville. They are decorated with the French flag to mark the celebrations in France, for the storming of the Bastille in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. It is a spontaneous work, painted on the beach as a direct depiction of the sea.

Trouville, a tourist resort on the Normandy coast, was a popular subject for Boudin, who was brought up in rural Normandy and spent most of his summers painting on the beach there. By the 1870s he had begun to turn his back on its social environment, preferring more traditional subjects such as this, which express nostalgia for Trouville's old existence as a fishing village. 1874 was the year of the first Impressionist exhibition and in this picture Boudin demonstrates an immediacy of response to the subject, creating the radiant light and colour that became an Impressionist hallmark. The painting has been signed by the artist and is dated '1874'. The title is that with which it was acquired but probably not original given the large number of small works of this type that Boudin painted.