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Lot Essay
Boudin relished the scenery surrounding the Normandy coast and specifically his birthplace, Honfleur, where he worked during the summers. Boudin met the eighteen-year-old Claude Monet in 1858 while in the town of Le Havre, and pointed out to him the delights of plein air painting. Monet later acknowledged the older artist's influence on his own work in a letter to the critic Gustave Geoffroy: "I owe everything to Boudin and am grateful to him for my success."
The present work is an example of the in situ studies Boudin completed during the final phase of his career, when his focus was primarily on capturing the wide, open skies of his beloved coastal landscape. Rather than the more realist subject matter he had treated in the 1860s, replete with the iconography of modernity, the later studies show the growing influence of Impressionism on Boudin's work. The present work concentrates on a single group of related figures with sketchily rendered beachgoers in the background. The palette is gentle and tempered, the paint swiftly applied, and the subject matter entirely free of anecdote or event.
The present work is an example of the in situ studies Boudin completed during the final phase of his career, when his focus was primarily on capturing the wide, open skies of his beloved coastal landscape. Rather than the more realist subject matter he had treated in the 1860s, replete with the iconography of modernity, the later studies show the growing influence of Impressionism on Boudin's work. The present work concentrates on a single group of related figures with sketchily rendered beachgoers in the background. The palette is gentle and tempered, the paint swiftly applied, and the subject matter entirely free of anecdote or event.