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Eugène Boudin Quotes
1824–1898 France
Eugène Louis Boudin (12 July 1824 - 8 August 1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a Marine art painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores.
Random Eugène Boudin quote
15 quotes
I exhaust myself terribly to content the world, and never manage to content myself.
I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes.
I shall do other things, but I will always be the painter of beaches.
I find my work increasingly more straining, in particular since I have been trying to finish my studies outside.
They [the holiday-visitors near Le Havre] love my little ladies [paintings] on the beach, and some people say that there's a thread of gold to exploit there.
..my trip to Venice [during 1895] will have been my swansong.
I have too often contented myself with being a hasty improviser: I have spent too much time exploring fleeting effects of the sky and sea.
I am obsessed with the idea of leaving. I must travel, for that would probably relax me.
I am a loner, a daydreamer who has been content to remain in his part of the world and look at the sky. The future will treat me as it does all of us. I am very much afraid it may be oblivion.
Everything that is painted directly and on the spot always has strength, a power, and a vivacity of touch one cannot recover in the studio.. .Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days of work at the easel [in the studio].
I regret I no longer have the years of youth needed to create a beautiful series of views of this place, which would in any case be rather difficult to paint due to the monuments, which require a good draughtsmanship and long stays in the city, like Ziem used to do in the past.
I think I will go back to mahogany [wood, as layer for his paintings], the only stable wood, together with old oak. But mahogany is so heavy. And it has another drawback, it blackens even through the primers if they are not thick enough and applied in several coats.
Imagine an immense plain.. ..in the middle, a small Gothic chapel surrounded by trees.. ..around that a hundred tents made of white canvas.. ..in open-air kitchens huge pots of boiling soup, incredible ragouts..
[I have] done various series of seascapes in different genres, beaches which demonstrated if not great art at least a reasonably faithful reproduction of the people of our age.
When I got back [from Le Havre], where I had made several sketches of the harbour exit, I thought of placing the sun in the background. I liked the picture so much that I painted it ten times over, with its three-master and its sun.
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