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Throughout his life Eugène Louis Boudin (1824 - 1894) never let go of one motif: the sea. This seems little surprising when one considers that he spent his youth on the coast of Normandy. The son of a harbour pilot, Boudin was already a ship's boy on a ferry in the port of Le Havre as a child. His contact with the fine arts was rather incidental. After he opened a stationery shop and picture frame shop as a young adult, local painters bought their utensils from him. Boudin was enthusiastic about their works and exhibited them in his shop. He began hesitantly but was encouraged by painters such as Eugène Isabey, Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet, who recognized his talent for picking up a brush himself. At the age of 22, he dedicated his life to art and finally left his native northern France in 1851 to study painting with Eugène Isabey in Paris.
Boudin is regarded as a pioneer of French Impressionism. This is not only proven by his friendships with Claude Monet and Gustave Courbet. It is his entire malhabitus that was to become formative for an entire epoch. Boudin was one of the first artists who preferred and propagated painting in the open air to the dusty studios. Preferred motifs in his works were therefore landscapes. Only there did he understand how to capture the constantly changing light or the shadowy movements of wind and water and capture them vividly on canvas. His paintings captivate with fast but nevertheless precise brushstrokes, which in nuances reflect a transfigured but nevertheless to the realism of his teacher Isabey owed image of seemingly random encounters with nature. In his works, the individual is not in the foreground. Everything is owed to the environment and lives in harmony with it.
Throughout his life Eugène Louis Boudin (1824 - 1894) never let go of one motif: the sea. This seems little surprising when one considers that he spent his youth on the coast of Normandy. The son of a harbour pilot, Boudin was already a ship's boy on a ferry in the port of Le Havre as a child. His contact with the fine arts was rather incidental. After he opened a stationery shop and picture frame shop as a young adult, local painters bought their utensils from him. Boudin was enthusiastic about their works and exhibited them in his shop. He began hesitantly but was encouraged by painters such as Eugène Isabey, Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet, who recognized his talent for picking up a brush himself. At the age of 22, he dedicated his life to art and finally left his native northern France in 1851 to study painting with Eugène Isabey in Paris.
Boudin is regarded as a pioneer of French Impressionism. This is not only proven by his friendships with Claude Monet and Gustave Courbet. It is his entire malhabitus that was to become formative for an entire epoch. Boudin was one of the first artists who preferred and propagated painting in the open air to the dusty studios. Preferred motifs in his works were therefore landscapes. Only there did he understand how to capture the constantly changing light or the shadowy movements of wind and water and capture them vividly on canvas. His paintings captivate with fast but nevertheless precise brushstrokes, which in nuances reflect a transfigured but nevertheless to the realism of his teacher Isabey owed image of seemingly random encounters with nature. In his works, the individual is not in the foreground. Everything is owed to the environment and lives in harmony with it.