French painter of the _paysage de mer_, was
the son of a pilot. Born at Honfleur he was cabin-boy for a while on
board the rickety steamer that plied between Havre and Honfleur across
the estuary of the Seine. But before old age came on him, Boudin's
father abandoned seafaring, and the son gave it up too, having of course
no real vocation for it, though he preserved to his last days much of a
sailor's character,--frankness, accessibility, open-heartedness. Boudin
the elder now established himself as stationer and frame-maker; this
time in the greater seaport town of Havre; and Eugene helped in the
little business, and, in stolen hours, produced certain drawings. That
was a time at which the romantic outlines of the Norman coast engaged
Isabey, and the green wide valleys of the inland country engaged Troyon;
and Troyon and Isabey, and Millet too, came to the shop at Havre. Young
Boudin found his desire to be a painter stimulated by their influence;
his work made a certain progress, and the interest taken in the young
man resulted in his being granted for a short term of years by the town
of his adoption a pension, that he might study painting. He studied
partly in Paris; but whatever individuality he possessed in those years
was hidden and covered, rather than disclosed. An instance of tiresome,
elaborate labour--good enough, no doubt, as groundwork, and not out of
keeping with what at least was the popular taste of that day--is his
"Pardon of Sainte Anne de la Palud," a Breton scene, of 1858, in which
he introduced the young Breton woman who was immediately to become his
wife. This conscientious and unmoving picture hangs in the museum of
Havre, along with a hundred later, fresher, thoroughly individual
studies and sketches, the gift of Boudin's brother, Louis Boudin, after
the painter's death. Re-established at Honfleur, Boudin was married and
poor. But his work gained character and added, to merely academic
correctness, character and charm. He was beginning to be himself by 1864
or 1865--that was the first of such periods of his as may be accounted
good--and, though not at that time so fully a master of transient
effects of weather as he became later, he began then to paint with a
success genuinely artistic the scenes of the harbour and the estuary,
which no longer lost vivacity by deliberate and too obvious
completeness. The war of 1870-71 found Boudin impecunious but great, for
then there had well begun the series of