And impressionism was … – Causer

Until August 31, 2025, the Marmottan Monet museum devoted an exhibition to Eugène Boudin (1824-1898), the master among others of the Marines and the beaches of Aauvillaises. The native of Honfleur, initiator unwittingly of a pictorial movement of which he was not completely convinced is now a classic and a scout of the sky

Nothing was easily acquired, nothing was meteoritic in the career of Eugène Boudin, the Norman patient. There was not the breed of the brilliant precocious which panic about the official criticism so quick to start, on a misunderstanding, of the first agitator who came. He was not crowned with immediate success and overwhelmed with orders, from his beginnings. He had to wait in the purgatory of artists until the 1880s to know if glory would smile at him or if forgetting would take his work. This journey was therefore not a long, quiet river and it was not ultimately until the last twenty years of his professional life that he could finally know a form of commercial tranquility and legitimate recognition beyond Calvados.

The merchant Durand-Ruel then watched over his destiny and the state, still late from an artistic battle, bought paintings and primaled him. Today, his contribution to the history of painting seems so obvious, his talent is so naturally imposed that it is even called “father of impressionism”. He trusted it softly because he did not fully adhere to this trend of “quickly”. Although he worked outside with his easel, in direct contact and fluctuating with the light, he finished his paintings in his workshop. Unlike the cantors of impressionism, a sausage as a good independent craftsman, he was committed printer and then supervisor on his own, largely inspired by the landscaper Corot, summarized between two impulses, the flamboyance of the fugitive and the detail of the drawing. As if two almost contradictory attractions coexisted in his art to lead to a dreamy harmony and yet, hanging on a social reality. It is the paradox of this painting which seduces us with its gracile flashes and grabs us just as much by the depth of its chosen themes. The exhibition shows how much the painter was attentive to the humble life of people, especially in his Breton “period”, he entered their modest peasant homes and testified to the work of the fields. Boudin is known for having set foot in the Young Monet’s floor, he was reluctant to follow him, he actually appreciated his achievements very little. Caricaturist gifted from the age of sixteen, Claude Monet had caught the eye of Boudin and was born between them a lasting and sincere friendship. Monet had to recognize at the end of his life that he owed everything to Boudin. The Marmottan museum has brought together 80 paintings from a private collection on the two hundred that a mathematician has, a named Yann Guyonvarc’h. The anecdote sticks to the boiling temperament and its side outside the academic lines. It is often a non-specialist that the intelligence of the line arises and, in this case, the preservation of the heritage. This self-taught collector with great clairvoyance, in a short time, has acquired a large number of canvases covering all the eras, the beginnings, the Marines, Deauville-Trouville, Finistère, Bordeaux, Venice, Belgium and to the Sun of the Midi. With his wife, this wise collector first fell in love with the Norman landscapes in an auction then, over time, he was carried away for the whole panoply of sausage to the Mediterranean sun. Boudin has always met guardian angels on his way; Before Guyonvarc’h, it was Baudelaire, Courbet or the pianist Bériot who saw in him, a major artist of the 19th century. If Boudin irritates the scrap dealers of the stylistic audacity by his plagues’ cushy scenes or have fun with his allegiance (not very remunerative) to the customers of the Duke of Morny, they forgot to look up. The sky of sausage, dotted with clouds, sometimes fleeting, sometimes tempestuous, in a palette ranging from sorrow at dawn of the world, is an ocean of plenitudes and delicate doubts. There is confusedly a call offshore and a amazement of firm land. For a painting wrongly described as a bourgeois and decorative, she moves the meninges.

Run see in the 16th arrondissement, the Etretat needle bathed in a blue-orange sea, it will disill the most cynical and disillusioned among us.

2 rue Louis Boilly, Paris (16th). 14 €