EUGENE BOUDIN

 Post 182 -by Gautam Shah  

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SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

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Eugene Louis Boudin (1824-1898) was the pioneer Plein air (out-door) marine landscape painter. He was first generation of Impressionists. In 1857/58, Boudin, befriended, a young Claude Monet. Monet inspired him ‘a love of bright hues and the play of light on water’. It was after watching Boudin, “apprehensively and then more attentively,” Monet, later paid tribute to Boudin's skills that he owed his becoming a painter to Eugene Boudin.

Boudin believed that “Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has strength, a power, and a vivacity of touch which one cannot recover in the studio.” “Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel (in the studio).” “Nature is richer than I represent it”. “I am tortured by her splendour. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth, if only I could be content just to admire them! But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting”.

Boudin’s method, in spite of being an impressionist, was meticulous. It is said, he would prepare large number of sketches, before preparing a composition on canvas. Boudin eventually stopped painting beach scenes with fashionable men and women, and from late 1860s started working on studies of the sky, water, boats, etc. Corot, said to him, "You are the master of the sky." Boudin had extra ordinary skills to paint the clouds and the various shades of atmosphere, filling a large part of the canvas. In a career that lasted nearly 50 years, he produced more than 4,000 paintings and more than 7,000 drawings, water-colours, and pastels. .

 

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