Postcards From The Edge of Impressionism

A career built on sand: Among the works in the National Gallery's Boudin show are "Beach Scene," above, from 1862. The exhibition commemorates the centennial of Paul Mellon, a major benefactor and shaper of the gallery whose donated works include many by Boudin. (National Gallery of Art)

Eugene Boudin painted visual vacations. His little windswept beachscapes make refreshing decorations. They're both sociable and gracious. They're both traditional and modern. At first glimpse they remind you of comfortable antiques, 17th-century Dutch genre scenes and mild English seascapes, but even as they do so they somehow point your mind -- through their brush strokes, and their subjects, and their high-Parisian chic -- toward the knowing and the new.

It's no wonder that Paul Mellon chose to buy so many. That inveterate collector could hang them almost anywhere -- on the jet, or in the country house or in one of the apartments. They were easily transportable, they fit under Mellon's arm. Most of those displayed in "Eugene Boudin at the National Gallery of Art," a show that honors Mellon, are less than a foot high. They didn't take a lot of wall.

Nor were those small pictures especially expensive. Boudin (1824-1898) had shown with Manet, Monet, Degas and Cezanne in the first impressionist exhibition of 1874, but his prices weren't like theirs. Yet Mellon found his Boudins gentle and endearing. Everywhere he hung them, they opened windows in the wall.

You see: The yellow sand, the moving clouds, the play of sun on water. You hear, or think you hear, the murmur of the waves, the snap of wind-whipped cloth, the crying of the gulls. The well-dressed people on the shore, though like people at a party, are also people in a reverie. Boudin understood the beach.

Beaches, like his pictures, are aesthetically reliable. The sand is warm beneath your feet; the view is vast and open, the whitecaps glisten all the far horizon. There is something timeless about beaches. The ones that Boudin painted were those he loved in Normandy. He'd known them all his life. He saw them changing utterly. That, too, is in his art.

He was born in Honfleur on the Channel coast in 1824. As a boy the painter saw steam replacing sail. His father was a mariner who served aboard the first black-smoke steamer to ply the Channel coast between Honfleur and Le Havre. Boudin went along as a cabin boy. Then he saw the tourists come.

Boudin's Yacht Basin at Trouville-Deauville, believed to date from 1895-96.(National Gallery of Art)

They began to come in crowds when the railroad from Paris reached the Trouville-Deauville station in 1863.

Unlike the sweating masses who would later crowd the sands of Jones Beach and Coney Island, these were fashionable Parisians, fastidiously dressed, who holidayed on the Channel shore -- for a day, a week, a season -- when taking beach vacations was still a new idea.

They didn't flash the flesh. When they dared enter the water they bathed in woolen suits -- woolen trousers, woolen jackets. Women wore bonnets made of oilcloth. The women of the party seldom bathed at all. Mostly they appeared, carrying their parasols, in ample rustling crinolines whose ever-widening skirts were supported by a cage of watch-spring steel wire.

"What a sight!" grumbled Gustave Flaubert, who only a few years before had swum naked from Trouville's then-deserted sands. "What a hideous sight!"

Boudin was more forgiving. He mildly defended what he called "my little studies of fashionable lives." His beach scenes, wrote the painter, were, "if not great art, at least reasonably faithful presentations of the people of our age."

He hadn't gone to art school. Boudin got his start by selling frames and brushes to painters up from Paris who, seeking outdoor subjects, had traveled north to Normandy to paint the rural sights.