Eugène Boudin

EUGÈNE BOUDIN (France, 1824 - 1898).
"Port view", 1890.
Oil on wood.
Signed with initials and dated in the right margin.
Restored.
Measurements: 24 x 35 cm.

Eugène Boudin would be one of the first landscape painters of the French school to paint directly outdoors, a "plein air", before the impressionists popularized this practice. He specialized in marine and harbor and coastal views, as we can see in the table in bidding. Boudin knew how to paint skillfully manipulated light, as well as large natural spaces depicted with poetry and striking verism. In this work he presents us with an image of realistic aesthetics, a port landscape worked with short and detailed brushstrokes. This brushstroke is also combined with a game of glazes that confers a certain atmosphere to the landscape, a clear and nuanced daylight that is reflected in the sea with extraordinary beauty.

The son of a port worker, he began working on steamships as a child, always near the sea, something that would mark his work. However, in 1835 he moved with his family to Le Havre, where his father opened a frame store in which works by Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet were exhibited. Knowledge of these painters, and also of Isabey and Couture, encouraged the young Boudin in his pictorial vocation. At the age of twenty-two he abandoned his work in commerce to devote himself fully to painting, and the following year he began a journey that would take him to Paris and Flanders. In 1850 he obtained a scholarship that allowed him to settle in the French capital, a city from which he would travel frequently to Normandy and Brittany in search of new coastal landscapes. In Boudin's work, from these early years of his career, a profound influence of the masters of Dutch Baroque landscape painting can be seen. In 1859 he made his debut at the Paris Salon, and in those years he met a very young Monet, whom he influenced to leave caricature and devote himself to landscape painting. From then on, both artists would be united by a great friendship, and in fact they would exhibit together in the first Impressionist exhibition (1874). Already fully established as an artist, in the 1870s Boudin made numerous trips, first to Belgium, the Netherlands and the south of France, and already in the 1890s he would travel regularly to Venice. He continued to exhibit his work at the Parisian Salons, and was awarded a third medal in 1881. He was also awarded a gold medal at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, and in 1892 he was made a knight of the French Legion of Honor. Towards the end of his life Boudin returned to the south of France, finally dying in 1898 in his native Deauville. His works are now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Metropolitan in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo and other leading art galleries around the world.