Eugène Boudin Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Eugene Louis Boudin was the child of a harbor pilot, and at age 10 the young man worked on a steamboat that ran between Le Havre and Honfleur. In 1835 the family moved to Le Havre, where Boudin's dad opened a store for stationery and picture frames.

In his shop, in which pictures were framed, Eugene Boudin came into contact with artists working in the area, and exhibited in the shop the paintings of Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet, who, alongside Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Thomas Couture whom he met during this time, urged the youthful Boudin to take after a artistic profession. At 22 years old he deserted the world of trade, began painting full-time, and traveled to Paris the next year and after that through Flanders.

Dutch seventeenth-century masters significantly impacted him, and on meeting the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, who had officially made his mark in French artistic circles, Eugene Louis Boudin was exhorted by his new companion to paint outside (en Plein air). He likewise worked with Troyon and Isabey, and in 1859 met Gustave Courbet.

In 1857 Eugene Boudin got to know the youthful Claude Monet, at that point just 18, and influenced him to surrender his caricature drawings and to become a landscape painter, ingraining in him an adoration for bright hues, splendid shades and the play of light on water later apparent in Monet's Impressionist works of art. The two stayed lifelong companions and Monet later paid tribute to Boudin's initial influence. Boudin joined Monet and his young companions in the first Impressionist display in 1873, however, he never viewed himself as a radical or pioneer.

Boudin's developing notoriety empowered him to travel widely in the 1870s. Eugene Louis Boudin went to Belgium, the Netherlands, and southern France, and from 1892 to 1895 made customary excursions to Venice. In 1892 Boudin was made a knight of the Légion d'Honneur, a to some degree late acknowledgment of his abilities and impact on the art of his peers.

Late in his life Eugene Boudin came back to the south of France as a refuge from ill-health and perceiving soon that the help it could give him was practically spent, he returned to his home at Deauville, to pass away within sight of Channel waters and under the Channel skies, he had painted so regularly.

Art Movement: Barbizon School.
Artists Influencing Eugene Boudin: Johan Jongkind.
He Traveled To Belgium, Netherlands, Italy.
Painters Eugene Louis Boudin Influenced: Claude Monet.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.