Eugène Louis Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint in the open air, directly from nature. His many beach scenes directly link the carefully observed naturalism of the early 19th century and the brilliant light and fluid brushwork of late 19th-century Impressionism.
Encouraged at an early age by the French landscape artist Jean-François Millet, Boudin studied briefly in Paris, where he became enamoured of the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Back on the Atlantic coast in 1853, Boudin began to paint the sea, his lifelong passion, making careful annotations on the backs of his paintings of the weather, the light, and the time of day.
In 1858 he met Claude Monet, then only 18 years old, and persuaded him to become a landscape painter, helping to instill in him a love of bright hues and the play of light on water later evident in Monet’s Impressionist paintings.