Tell me about Eugène Boudin

Born in the small town of Honfleur on the Normandy coast in 1824, Eugène Boudin was one of many French painters to develop a lifelong relationship with the light and terroir of this region. Despite his struggles at times to hone his artistic vision, Boudin produced more than 4000 paintings and 7000 works on paper in his lifetime.¹ Rehs, ‘Biography – Eugène Louis Boudin’, Rehs Galleries, <https://rehs.com>, date accessed 30 Nov. 2023. Boudin’s beachscapes, thoughtfully composed and evidencing an acute power of observation, are part of an oeuvre often lost in the shadow of Impressionism. Though sixteen years Boudin’s junior, it was Claude Monet who declared, ‘If I become a painter, I owe it to Eugène Boudin’.²Portland Art Museum, ‘Online collections’, Portland Art Museum, <http://portlandartmuseum.us>, date accessed 30 Nov. 2023. While Boudin was named in his lifetime a petit-maître (minor artist), it is arguable that Boudin’s expertise was no smaller than his influence.

Boudin grew up with the ocean at the forefront of his existence. The son of a ship’s captain, he worked as a cabin boy at the age of ten on his father’s ferryboat, as it traversed the waters between Honfleur and Le Havre.³The National Gallery, ‘Eugène Boudin’, The National Gallery, <https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/eugene-boudin>, date accessed 30 Nov. 2023. While his family soon retired to the town of Le Havre to manage a framing business, Boudin’s journeys to sea would continue, now through the medium of paint. Boudin first exhibited at the Salon in 1858 with The Pardon of Saint-Anne-La-Palud (The Met, New York City). Beginning in 1667, the Salon was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art event in the Western world. While The Pardon of Saint-Anne-La-Palud was the depiction of a religious festival, Boudin’s affinity with the ocean led to the beachscapes that exemplify his style from the 1860s onwards. Mainly painted at the Norman resort towns of Deauville and Trouville, the horizontal format of these works show an expansive sky and low shoreline, influenced by the composition of Dutch landscape artists.⁴ Julia Welch, ‘Boudin, Mentor to Monet’, in French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, p. 43.

In the early 1850s, Boudin earned a scholarship that enabled him to move to Paris, where he enrolled as a student in the studio of Eugène Isabey and worked as a copyist at the Louvre – for the first time formalising his art education. Yet, just as the ocean maintained a lifelong hold over Boudin, so too did the town of Le Havre. Eschewing residency in the more cosmopolitan French cities of the time, Boudin returned to his hometown. For Boudin, it was a certainty that ‘everything painted directly on site always has a strength, a power, a vivacity of touch’ that could not be located in a studio.⁵Eugène Boudin, in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, Secker & Warburg, London, 1973, p. 38 It was to the coastline of Normandy that Boudin returned in the late 1850s to paint en plein air (in the open air), refining the small-scale marine works now synonymous with his name.

Both works by Boudin in the NGV Collection are from his later years, painted less than a decade before his death in 1898. Low tide at Trouville, 1894 (purchased with funds generously donated by the Felton Bequest), is slightly sparser than earlier compositions, with less of the fashionable figures that populated Boudin’s early shorelines. Yet, this work attests to Boudin’s lifelong preoccupation with the nuances of light as the sky reaches down to the ocean and the water leads to sand. Low tide at Trouville, like much of Boudin’s oeuvre, is situated at the shoreline. The gaze of the artist looks outwards, an eternal spectator to the ships and the ocean.

It was a chance encounter between Boudin and an eighteen-year-old Claude Monet in 1858 that led to a lifetime of mentorship.⁶Welch, p, 43. At thirty-four years old Boudin was working in the family framing business in Le Havre and was by no means an established painter. Monet was sketching caricatures of local characters, his future as one of the founders of Impressionism not yet formed. With Boudin’s encouragement, Monet put aside the charcoal and began to paint en plein air. For Monet, it was after watching Boudin set up his easel and begin to work that his own ‘destiny in painting was opened.’⁷Claude Monet, in Welch, p. 43.

The artists corresponded throughout their lives, the young Monet first learning and then surpassing in critical acclaim. Although consistently overlooked for commendations, Boudin declared ‘I shall always be a painter of beaches’.⁸Eugène Boudin, ‘Letter to his brother Louis Boudin, 29 Nov. 1865’, in G. Jean-Aubry, Boudin d’apres des documents inedits, l’homme et l’oeuvre, Les Editions Bernheim-jeune, Paris, 1922, p. 62. Currently on display at NGV International, The port of Le Havre, 1892 (also purchased with funds generously donated by the Felton Bequest), hangs adjacent to Claude Monet. This late view of Le Havre’s bustling port is an intimate capturing of light, in which, as critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary once noted, ‘you can almost smell the salty fragrance of the ocean’.⁹Alfred Sensier, Souvenirs sur Th. Rousseau, Leon Techener & Durand-Ruel, 1872, Paris, p. 118. This NGV Collection work was painted just six years before Boudin’s death. That same year he wrote to Monet in a reminiscence on the days of the past, the trips to paint en plein air and the nostalgia for youth. The letter is signed, ‘the oldest of your painting friends, E. Boudin’.¹⁰Eugène Boudin, letter to Claude Monet, 28 July 1892, in Jean-Aubry, pp. 103–4.

Jessica McEwen is NGV Project Officer, Exhibitions Management and Design.

This article first appeared in the January–February 2024 edition of NGV Magazine.

Notes