Works by Eugène Louis Boudin

Eugène Boudin, an early French painter of landscapes in the open air, painted the sea and the life along its shores, and Corot named him the "King of the skies".

Boudin, born in Honfleur as the son of a harbour pilot, worked in his father's stationery and frame shop in Le Havre and later kept his own, where he showed paintings by Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet; they and others pushed him to become a painter. The Dutch painter Johan Jongkind told him to work outdoors, and in 1857/58 Boudin talked the teenage Claude Monet out of caricatures and into landscape.

In Beach at Trouville, from 1864/1865, a row of figures on chairs sits low along the sand, a woman's blue cape lifts in the wind, and sky and cloud take up most of the panel. Concert at the Casino of Deauville of 1865 gathers its audience beside a pavilion whose roof rests on slender columns, the dresses picked out in white and pink. Pastel suited his studies of sea and sky made on the spot, being easy to carry and direct: in Seascape with Open Sky, dated 1860, clouds take up nearly the whole sheet above a strip of sea and a small sailing boat.

From 1892 to 1895 he went to Venice regularly, and in Venice, Santa Maria della Salute from San Giorgio of 1895 the domed church sits low across blue-green water under a pale sky. Water is the main subject of about half the works below, and boats turn up in nearly as many; people come next, and there are some drawings among the paintings.

Sources: Wikipedia, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art. Portrait: Pierre Petit.