Eugène Boudin valuation
Painter of Normandy beaches and big skies, who persuaded the teenage Monet to paint outdoors.
Eugène Boudin was born at Honfleur in 1824, the son of a harbour pilot.
What a work by Eugène Boudin is worth
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Bio
Eugène Boudin was born at Honfleur in 1824, the son of a harbour pilot. The family moved to Le Havre in 1835, where his father opened a stationery and framing shop. Boudin later ran his own, and painters whose work he framed and showed there, among them Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet, encouraged him to paint, as did Eugène Isabey and Thomas Couture. He took up painting full time at twenty-two, went to Paris on a grant in 1850, and on Johan Jongkind's advice worked out of doors. He made his debut at the Salon of 1859. Around 1857 he met the young Claude Monet and persuaded him to paint landscape, and he took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. He spent the Franco-Prussian War in Antwerp, painted in Venice in the 1890s and died at Deauville in 1898.
Boudin was prolific. Beach scenes at Trouville and Deauville, harbours, estuaries and quick oil studies of sky and cloud come up often, many on small panels, and much of the work is inscribed with the place and date. Robert Schmit's catalogue raisonné, with its supplements, is the reference, and a work is expected to be in it. Copies and imitations exist, so the signature and inscription are checked against the catalogue entry.
Baudelaire, Monet and Honfleur
Baudelaire, introduced to him by Gustave Courbet, praised his pastel studies of the sky in his review of the 1859 Salon, and Corot called him the king of the skies. Monet acknowledged Boudin's early influence for the rest of his life.
He won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and was made a knight of the Légion d'honneur in 1892. The museum at Honfleur bears his name.
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