Charles Baudelaire on Eugène Boudin

“If you have had the leisure to acquaint yourself with these meteorological beauties, you will be able to verify, by memory, the exactness of Monsieur Boudin's observations. Hide the legend with your hand, and you will still be able to guess correctly at the season, the hour and the wind. I don’t exaggerate one bit. I've seen it. Ultimately all these fantastically shaped, luminous clouds, this chaotic darkness, these immense expanses of green and pink, each hung and added on to the next, these gaping furnaces, these purple and black satin firmaments, crumpled, rolled or torn, these horizons in mourning or running with molten metal, all these depths, all these splendours, go to my head like an intoxicating liquor or like the eloquence of opium.. ..It's a curious thing, but it never occurred to me once, in front of these liquid or aerial wonders, to complain about the absence of man.”

“[dazzled by what Baudelaire called Boudin's 'meteorological beauties']..these studies, so quickly and accurately sketched from what is the most inconstant, the most elusive in its shape and colour, waves and clouds, always bear a marginal note of the date, time and the wind.”

“[if other artists would visit Boudin] they would then understand what they [the starting Impressionists in Paris] do not seem to understand, namely the difference between a sketch and a picture.. ..He well knows that all this must be made into a picture by applying poetic impression recalled at will; he is not pretentious enough to claim that his sketches are finished pictures.”