The son of a sailor, Louis-Eugène Boudin lived in the port city of Le Havre where he ran a small stationery and framing shop. Encouraged by some of the artists whose work he occasionally exhibited, he took up painting in 1847. By the early 1850s, he had established a career as a landscape painter, working in Le Havre, Rouen, Honfleur and Paris. His marine scenes, in particular, attracted favourable comment when he started exhibiting regularly at the Salon from 1859.
The French artist found a ready market for his paintings and, from 1881 onwards, enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who sold his works in France and America. His oil paintings and lively watercolours, which captured effects of light and colour in a captivating way, were an important early influence on Claude Monet, who was his pupil.
Though prolific as an artist, Boudin was never particularly concerned with his public stature nor his reputation, and was content with his modest success as a petit maître or a minor artist. As he once said to a critic: ‘I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky.’ The artist was particularly drawn to the sky, producing numerous studies of this natural form. ‘To swim in the open sky. To achieve a cloud’s tenderness. To suspend those background masses, far off in the grey mist, and break up the azure,’ he wrote in one of his notebooks. ‘What delight and what torment!’
The artist Camille Corot is said to have referred to Boudin as ‘the king of skies’, while the novelist Alexandre Dumas also admired his sky studies. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, writing in 1859, noted that ‘M. Boudin, who might pride himself on his devotion to his art, shows his curious collection with great modesty…These studies, so swiftly and accurately sketched, after what, in terms of force and colour, are the most inconstant, the most fleeting of things, after waves and clouds…all these clouds with their fantastic, luminous shapes…’
Some 6,000 drawings, watercolours and oil sketches – most of the contents of Boudin’s studio upon his death – are now at the Louvre. A certain number of his comparable sky and cloud studies, many of them small in scale (such as this work acquired by EKCART Asia) are in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux in Le Havre and the Musée Eugène Boudin in Honfleur.
