Postcards From The Edge of Impressionism

Boudin, from the start, painted what he saw (the wheeled canvas beach cabins, the folding chairs for rent and the delicate young women in their new Parisian clothes). More important, he painted what he loved and deeply knew, "this vastness, this delicacy," the ever-shifting moods of the cloudscape and the sea.

His touch was free, but not too free. Nothing in his art threatened or confounded contemporary taste. In those days before the snapshot, his little paintings mostly sold as vacation souvenirs. Still, there's more to them than that. Boudin's pictures are curiously ambiguous. Generalized, but needle-sharp, they open up the viewer's thoughts in unexpected ways.

Is Boudin's art impressionist? Well, sort of yes and sort of no. It's true he painted glimpses, and studied changing light, and showed with radical impressionists, but his colors do not flare, and he didn't make them up, and nothing in his spirit is radical at all. One sympathetic critic of the first impressionist exhibition rightly wrote that Boudin was "only remotely associated with this tradition."

And are his paintings French? Well, yes, but not entirely. There is also something Dutch in their almost-scientific treatment of the clouds. In their Victorian propriety, their panoramic spread, and their modesty of scale they feel partly English, too.

And look at Boudin's figures. You seldom see a mouth, or an eyebrow or a nose; his faces are but daubs of paint. His people could be anyone, but their costumes, on the other hand, are fastidiously specific. Note, as one example, the ribbons on the crinolines at the height of the knee. They are there because the fashionable women of the 1860s often reefed their outer skirts as sailors reef their sails. Boudin's oceangoing vessels, too, are both summarized and definite. Even when their shapes seem no more than suggested, one doesn't doubt at all that the rigging is just right.

In memoirs of the time, Boudin seems a lovely man, generous and modest. It was Boudin who encouraged the youthful Claude Monet to go painting out-of-doors. "My master," Monet called him. "I have said it once and I shall say it again," wrote that far-more-famous painter, "I owe everything to Boudin."

Boudin is the sort of painter that the French have in mind when the speak of "little masters." In his case both words fit.

His show in the East Building is just a two-room exhibition. His pictures, when first seen, seem but small spots on the wall. But then you start to feel the tang of the salt air, and the sea wind in the skies, and the depth of the horizon as it stretches all around you. Boudin reduces stress. He takes you off on holiday. None of this is earthshaking, it isn't even close, but, in its small way, it's mastery nonetheless.

As his sales grew Boudin started traveling. He went to Holland, to Venice, to the south of France. Then stomach cancer got him. "I am hardly able to walk," he wrote. "I no longer have the strength to hold my paintbrush." He yearned to see the northern sea once more before the end. He made it just in time.

Boudin died in Deauville on Aug. 18, 1898.

Eugene Boudin at the National Gallery of Art Of the 41 pictures in the show, 26 are gifts from philanthropist Paul Mellon, the centennial of whose birth the Boudin show commemorates. It will remain in the East Building, Constitution Avenue and Fourth Street NW, through Aug. 5. Open Monday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Free. 202-737-4215. http://www.nga.gov/