Boudin

Eugène Boudin (1824-1898), precursor of Impressionism and undisputed master of marine painting, was born in Honfleur to a family of sailors. Son of a harbor pilot, he grew up surrounded by the sea and the changing skies of Normandy that would become his subjects of choice. After running a framing shop in Le Havre where he met painters from the Barbizon School, he devoted himself entirely to painting around 1850. A pioneer of plein air painting, he developed a spontaneous technique to capture fleeting atmospheric effects—these “meteorologies” as he called them. Mentor to young Claude Monet, whom he introduced to painting from nature, Boudin profoundly influenced the Impressionist movement through his modern vision of landscape. His canvases of Trouville and Deauville beaches, populated with elegant ladies in crinolines, bear delicate poetic witness to the seaside society of the Second Empire. Recognized during his lifetime, he exhibited regularly at the Salon and participated in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, confirming his role as a bridge between traditional art and pictorial modernity.

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