1824-1898 • French • Painter • Naturalist
Your letter arrived at the moment when I was showing [three men] my little studies of fashionable beach resorts. These gentlemen congratulated me precisely for having dared to put into paint the things and people of our time. - Boudin
With the beach scenes mentioned above, Boudin explored a new subject and carved out his niche in out-of-doors painting: modern life at the seashore. As the railroads expanded in the 1850s, beaches became increasingly popular middle-class resort destinations. During the 1860s, Boudin recorded scenes like that in The Beach at Trouville (1865), in which a line of fully dressed, windswept visitors to the seashore stand, their backs to us, looking across the ocean. Above them large clouds move briskly, and along the shore work horses wait, ready to haul off the two tall boxes in which people changed into their bathing costumes. Boudin's style seems as brisk and breezy as the wind that whisks clouds, skirts, scarves, and whitecaps into froth. The recreational seashore became a popular theme, also painted by M ONET, whom Boudin "dis covered " and encouraged to paint seri ously, and by the American HOMER, who visited France in 1866. The tradi tion of outdoor painting to which Boudin belongs is called Naturalism to distinguish it from the movement known as REALISM, 2 and sometimes "pre-Impressionism," as it preceded the true IMPRESSIONIST movement.
