Eugène Boudin

1824 – 1898

French landscape painter, son of a sea captain who settled in Le Havre in 1835. He met artists through his father's stationery and framing shop, which also sold artists' supplies. Jean-Baptiste Isabey, Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet would come by and offer the young Boudin advice. In 1850, Boudin received a scholarship to study art in Paris. In 1859, he met Gustave Courbet and poet/art critic Charles Baudelaire, who took an interest in his work. That year Boudin submitted his work to the Salon for the first time and was accepted. Boudin was influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch century masters, and on meeting the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, he was advised by his new friend to paint outdoors (en plein air). Boudin participated in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and also exhibited in the annual Salon that year. He did not participate in any subsequent Impressionist exhibitions, preferring instead to stick to the Salon system. In 1889 he won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle and in 1891 he became a knight of the Légion d'honneur. Late in life Boudin moved to the south of France, but as his health deteriorated he chose to return to Normandy to die in the region that launched his career as one of the maverick plein-air painters of his era.

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