Eugène Louis Boudin

Eugène Boudin painted skies. His small beach scenes at Trouville, with fashionable holidaymakers in crinolines under huge, shifting clouds, and his harbours full of boats and flags, catch the changing light of the Normandy coast with quick, fresh strokes. Corot called him the king of skies.

Born in Honfleur in 1824, he worked in his father’s picture-framing shop in Le Havre, where he met painters such as Millet and Couture. Encouraged by the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, he worked outdoors, directly in front of the subject. Around 1857 he persuaded the young Claude Monet to give up caricature and paint landscape out of doors, a turning point for Monet and for Impressionism. Boudin showed at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 and received the Légion d’honneur in 1892. He died in 1898.

Bathers on the Beach at Trouville is classic Boudin, a bright crowd under an enormous sky.