Eugène Boudin Quotes (1824-1898)

“Nature is richer than I represent it.. .Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting.”

“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.”

“Mister Boudin.. ..has even invented a type of seascape which belongs entirely to him and which consists in painting, along with the beach itself, the exotic high society which gathers in our sea resorts during the summer.”

“Boudin's art is the kind of art which wins you over, not by its audacity of expression or the obtrusive violence of its touch, but by its beauty, which combines intimacy, delicacy and truth innovative in a way because it developed towards the open air, toward impression.. ..his palette of greys and blues, his exquisite shading, his consistent harmony were neither conventional nor formalistic – rather, they were an accurate reflection of nature glimpsed sensitively.”

“..[Boudin started a new genre of seascape] which consists of painting the beach and all those exotic figures from high society whom summer brings to our coastal resorts.”

“His close friend, Isabey, eventually suggested to Boudin that he travel to Trouville and Deauville to work with beach scenes, two areas that were rapidly becoming popular sites for bourgeois relaxation. He completed several sketches and paintings in this area, focusing on the variation in dress, permutations of the sky, and effects of the environment and weather. Boudin thought these were 'if not a grand art, at least a fairly sincere reproduction of the world of our epoch'.”

“This artist's impulsive intelligence and initiative has never, since he began to exhibit, won him any recompense: this is a glaring injustice that one must never cease to publicize. They will let this painter grow old, they will let illness weaken him and they will make his decline their pretext for abandoning him to this death, uncaring of his great value.”

“Where many painters only found a pretext for larges surfaces of blue, opaque and dirty, Eugène Boudin astonishes us by a variety and an incomparable accuracy: for him each cloud has a physiognomy.. ..to give us the impression of immensity and to hold our attention, allured by the innovation of a spectacle which everyday we have under our eyes and which we had never seen.”

“There at the moment in Honfleur.. ..Boudin and Jongkind are here; we get on marvelously.. ..There's lots to be learned and nature begins to grow beautiful..”

“I could not appreciate his [Boudin's] paintings [Monet was c. 16 years old] and when he offered to take me with him to paint outdoors in the open countryside, I always found a pretext and refused politely. But when Summer came, I was more or less free to dispose of my time as I wished and I had no feasible excuse left to give him and gave in. Thus it was, that Boudin - with his inexhaustible kindness - took it upon himself to educate me. With time, my eyes began to open and I really started to understand nature. I also learned to love it. I would analyze its forms with my pencil. I would study its colorations.”

“..I can say from the bottom of my heart that Boudin is not only destined to be a great painter, but can already be considered on a level with the young painters of our new school.”