Musée No:792.014
Regular price £25.00Open Skies
Artist: Eugène Boudin
Date:1860
Eugène Louis Boudin (1824-1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. He was a marine painter, and expert in painting everything to do with the sea and along its shores. Corot called him the "King of the skies". Born in the gorgeous French coastal town of Honfleur, Boudin was the son of a harbour pilot, and at age 10 he worked on a steamboat that ran between Le Havre and Honfleur. At the age of 22 he abandoned the world of commerce and started painting full-time. The Dutch 17th-century masters profoundly influenced him, and on meeting the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, who had already made his mark in French artistic circles, Boudin was advised by his new friend to paint en plein air.
In around 1857 Boudin met and befriended the young Claude Monet, then only 18, and persuaded him to give up his teenage caricature drawings and to become a landscape painter, helping to instil in him a love of bright hues and the play of light on water so familiar in Monet's Impressionist paintings. 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 1873, but never considered himself a radical or innovator.