Eugène Boudin

Eugène Louis Boudin was born in 1824 in Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, the son of a harbour pilot. As a boy he worked on a steamboat that ran between Le Havre and Honfleur. When the family moved to Le Havre in 1835, his father opened a shop selling stationery and picture frames, and young Eugène later opened a shop of his own.

That shop changed his life. Artists working in the area brought their pictures to be framed, and Boudin met and showed work by painters such as Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet. They encouraged him to paint. At twenty-two he gave up the business to paint full time. In 1850 he received a grant from the town of Le Havre to study in Paris.

Boudin became one of the first French landscape painters to work outdoors, directly from nature. He painted the sea, the harbours and above all the sky. He said that anything painted directly on the spot always had a strength and liveliness that could not be recaptured in the studio. Camille Corot called him "the king of skies," and the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire praised his pastel studies of clouds.

In the late 1850s he met the teenage Claude Monet in Le Havre, then known for his caricatures, and persuaded him to come out and paint in the open air. Monet later credited Boudin with opening his eyes. Boudin exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and he is often called a forerunner of Impressionism.

In the 1860s Boudin found his most famous subject: the fashionable visitors on the beaches of Trouville and Deauville. The new railway had turned these Normandy resorts into summer destinations for Paris society. Boudin painted the crowds in crinolines and top hats, small figures beneath enormous skies, flags flapping in the wind. Beach Scene (1862) and The Beach at Deauville (1864) in our collection belong to this famous series, and Women on the Beach at Berck (1881) shows him returning to the subject on the northern coast years later.

He travelled widely along the coasts of Brittany and Normandy and to Bordeaux, Belgium, Holland and Venice. View of Bordeaux, from the Quai des Chartrons (1874) shows the busy port on the Garonne.

Boudin died in 1898 at Deauville. The Musée Eugène Boudin in Honfleur and the Musée d'art moderne André Malraux in Le Havre hold large collections of his work.