8. Eugène Louis Boudin (French, 1824–1898) The Beach at Trouville, circa 1887–96 Oil on canvas, 14 3/8 × 23 in. (36.5 × 58.4 cm) Bequest of Robert B. Woodward, 15.314
Do not dread the grand effects in the sky and on the sea, go after them in their variety and their power without worrying about convention. —Eugène Louis Boudin5 For Boudin, born the son of a mariner in the port city of Honfleur, the seaside remained a powerful source of inspiration throughout his career. His best-known seascapes depict colorful crowds of vacationers strolling on the beaches of fashionable resorts such as Trouville and Deauville on the Normandy coast, enjoying views of the ocean—and each other—beneath bright skies and windswept clouds (fig. 4). Yet Boudin was also attracted to these same beaches when they were largely empty of people. The Beach at Trouville is typical of his minimally populated coastal scenes. The sand is occupied not by a throng of Parisian tourists enjoying a day of leisure, but by a couple of local workers crossing the beach in a wood horse-drawn cart.
Boudin focused his attention in this late seascape on the lone figures enveloped by horizontal expanses of sky, water, and ground, a compositional format that harked back to seventeenth-century Dutch marine paintings. Looking forward, however, was the freshness and immediacy of Boudin’s paint handling, and his commitment to working en plein air to capture the play of light on water and clouds in saturated and unmodulated patches of color. These methods had a profound influence on his younger friend Claude Monet, and demonstrate why Boudin is recognized as an important forerunner of the Impressionists. This painting, and Pierre-Édouard Frère’s The Little Cook (see pl. 17), was part of the bequest of Robert B. Woodward, whose primary collecting interests were Chinese jade and ancient glass. LS
Fig. 4. Eugène Louis Boudin (French, 1824– 1898). Beach of Trouville, 1867. Oil on canvas, 24 13/16 × 35 1/16 in. (63 × 89 cm). The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, P.1985-0001
28 French Moderns