By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 25, 2007
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.
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.
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/
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