Painting: Inventor of the Seashore

To Eugene Boudin, son of a sailor, the choice was simple: either go to sea or paint it. Boudin opted for the artist’s path, and the world has been in his debt ever since. The poet Baudelaire was astounded. From Boudin’s paintings, he wrote, it was possible to “guess the season, the hour and the wind.” To Camille Corot, he was “the king of the skies.” And in the 20th century, Georges Braque, looking back, said flatly: “Boudin invented the seashore.”

The quiet little man who was the object of such attention never thought so well of himself. Born in 1824, he had spent his childhood at Le Havre, and when his early facility at drawing earned him a grant to study art in Paris, he chose instead to paint on his own and use the money for living. Boudin had discovered and nurtured the young Claude Monet, but he did not think that he himself had the “temperament” to become a great master. And so he preferred to do what pleased him. Unencumbered by academic training, he developed alone into a proto-impressionist, fascinated by the flow and flood of light.

Boudin’s novel style delayed his recognition in Paris, but discerning Americans were soon buying his “marines,” and last week many of those still in U.S. collections, as well as some canvases from France, were gathered into his first American retrospective by Manhattan’s Hirschl and Adler gallery.

Today Boudin’s skies are as sunny as the day they were painted, and the sea off Normandy sparkles as freshly. In his canvases, crinolined ladies titter and talk on a fully dressed visit to the beach as he first viewed them with his fresh, unassuming eye. A lone clammer trudges to his early morning task while the grey sky pushes its bleakness into the sands. Boudin pursued all the moods of the sea—except mist, for that would have inhibited his view of the sky.

Boudin’s precise renderings rarely filled more than a 25-in. by 32-in. canvas. Once he had thought he would do larger works. In 1859 he wrote in his notebook of feeling “freed somewhat of timidity; I shall try some broad paintings, things on a big scale and more particular in tone.” But he never really managed it, and it is probably just as well. Art needs its tiny jewels as well as its grand masters.