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Port Scene ...
Eugene Boudin
Eugene Boudin July 1824 – August 1898
Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores.
Prior to the formation of the Impressionists, the untrained artist Eugene Boudin had, by the 1860s, already revealed an interest in plein air painting and the depiction of contemporary land- and seascapes. His choice of imagery was influenced by his childhood spent along the coasts of Normandy, rejecting the claustrophobic Parisian scene, and instead faithfully sketching the natural landscape which inspired him most.
In 1856/57 Boudin met the young Claude Monet who spent several months working with Boudin in his studio. It was after watching Boudin, “apprehensively and then more attentively,” that Monet revealed: “…it was as if a veil had been torn from my eyes. I had understood, I had grasped what painting could be. Boudin’s absorption of his work, and his independence, were enough to decide the entire future and development of my painting.” The two remained lifelong friends and Monet later paid tribute to Boudin’s early influence. Boudin joined Monet and his young friends in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, but never considered himself a radical or innovator.
Despite his influence on younger artists, Boudin was a modest and indefatigable worker who was never satisfied with his perceived inability to fully render the splendors that nature set before him. Throughout his career, he struggled to overcome his own melancholic disposition and self-deprecation, despite continual praise from his many acquaintances, of which one could count Constant Troyon, Jean-Francois Millet, Gustave Courbet, Monet, and Charles Baudelaire, to name just a few. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot even referred to Boudin as “the king of skies.”
Given his personality, Boudin most likely never fully grasped the significance of his artistic contribution: that he was the, according to art critic Arsène Alexandre, “precursor” to the Impressionist movement, a stepping stone to one of the most talked about and, in modern times, one of the most popular phases in nineteenth century art. Boudin’s ability to “conserve an attitude of familiarity with nature…without seeking to flatter or embellish it,” gave his audiences the opportunity to be “put in direct contact with her,” a feature that was often lost on the later generations of painters. |
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