For z, the last letter in this alphabet of landscape painting, I offer a small selection of the very finest works that form the zeitgeist of the genre in Western art.

Landscape of the Danube near Regensburg is one of Albrecht Altdorfer’s five known pure landscape paintings, and was made between about 1528-30. This develops repoussoir, following the foreground – middle distance – far distance convention, with a low horizon to accommodate the framing trees and allow a dramatic cloudscape, laying the foundation for so many landscapes of the future.

Landscape with a Calm from about 1651 is one of Nicolas Poussin’s late pure landscape paintings, of a view that never existed except in the artist’s imagination, although there’s something familiar about each of the elements within it. Like an Advent calendar, it contains scattered scenes which the viewer is tempted to try to construct into a coherent narrative, but are probably all part of the painting’s mode.

In the foreground is a herdsman with his dog, tending to a small flock of goats, which are grazing erratically at the borders of a track meandering down to the lake. The only distinctive feature of the man, indeed of this whole passage, is how non-descript he is. He has nothing that could be interpreted as an attribute, and gives no clue as to his identity. The most prominent feature of the painting is its large Italianate villa. In front of its outermost earthworks, two herdsmen tend a flock of sheep and cattle. The man on the left is playing bagpipes. There are figures scattered just outside and within the grounds of the villa, and two visible at its ground floor windows. There is nothing which appears to be out of the ordinary here either.

All the clues given by the artist point towards the mode of calm and peace in this landscape. Its one small burst of activity is a galloping horse. The air is so calm that the lake reflects like a mirror, and one tiny patch of broken water stands out.

An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c 1636) is one of Peter Paul Rubens larger landscapes from the end of his career. As the sun is rising off to the right, a man drives a cart, on top of which a woman is perched precariously, away from Ruben’s castellated mansion. Beside that stream, a hunter is stalking game with his gun and dog.

A small group of people are on the grass in front of the house: a woman is seated, perhaps nursing an infant; next to her is another woman, and a man. Another man is fishing in the moat, from the bridge which connects its main entrance with the outside world. At the far right, a milkmaid walks out to a small herd of cows. There are birds in the sky, and some small tits and others on the scrub in the foreground. Beyond, a great plain of meadows and woods sweeps far to the horizon. The day has begun.

The similarities in his composition with those of nearly twenty years earlier are remarkable. However, there’s one big difference: while undoubtedly idealised, this painting is based on a real and known geographical location just outside the city of Antwerp.

Some landscape painters, including Jacob van Ruisdael, turned their canvases to make portraits of towering clouds, as in his View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields from about 1665. The distant town of Haarlem with its monumentally large church of Saint Bavo – works of man – is dwarfed by these high cumulus clouds, the works of God. This motif proved so popular that van Ruisdael painted many variants of the same view, making it now one of the most widespread landscapes across the galleries of Europe.

Before Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes sketched in oils in front of his motifs in the Roman Campagna, in around 1782, very few landscape paintings were made in front of the motif. Valenciennes not only assembled himself a library of sketches such as this magnificent View of Rome, but wrote an influential treatise advocating this as a technique. This paved the way for greater fidelity in views and ultimately Impressionism.

JMW Turner’s Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from 1839 anticipates Impressionist style. It retains several conventional features, though, using repoussoir at the right, and a parade of buildings to lead the eye past the mass of the Colosseum into the distant mist. He uses staffage extensively in the foreground, with a group of three goats at the right and sundry figures at the left. As this is a view from elevation looking down, the horizon is for once well above its midline.

Claude Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Wave, painted on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1882, is inspired by the ukiyo-e print of Hokusai’s Great Wave, and takes Impressionism to its limits in the dissolution of form.

In the late nineteenth century, landscape painters including Camille Pissarro transferred their attention to cities like Paris, in his case primarily because of eye problems. In January 1897, Pissarro painted from a hotel room overlooking the Rue Saint-Lazare, then in February transferred to a room with a view over the Boulevard Montmartre, where he painted some of his finest cityscapes. His Boulevard Montmartre, Spring Morning (1897) is composed primarily of buildings and streets, a plethora of figures, and countless carriages to move those people around.

Ferdinand Hodler’s view of Lake Geneva with Mont Blanc in the (Red) Dawn Light, painted a few months before he died in 1918, completed his reduction of this view into bands consisting of water coloured by the sky, a zone of blue reflections of the far bank, the merged distant shore and mountains, and the sky.

Paul Nash’s Eclipse of the Sunflower (1945) was inspired by William Blake’s poem Ah! Sunflower, from his Songs of Experience (1794):

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Nash shows a sunflower undergoing an eclipse, as if a celestial body. Below is a windswept sea and the coast of Dorset, as he had painted below the ‘flying boat’ in his Defence of Albion in 1942. Just above that coast are more peculiar botanical structures relating to the sunflower, and behind is the threatening sky of an imminent storm.

I hope you have enjoyed this series celebrating different aspects of landscape painting.

If paintings of swimmers have been rare in narrative, they have been landmarks elsewhere, where some of the most significant paintings in the Impressionist canon are those painted by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir of a popular swimming resort near Paris.

In the summer of 1869, Renoir lived at his parents house in Louveciennes, where the Pissarros were also renting a house. He visited the Monets, who were living near Bougival, and often painted alongside Claude Monet. Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited the popular bathing houses on the Seine known as La Grenouillère. Here Monet gave an early statement of his Impressionist agenda, a plein air oil sketch originally intended to be turned into a finished painting for submission to the Salon the following year. The pair then realised that Impressionism was about these sketched instants.

Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère (1869) is one of the most significant paintings now in London’s National Gallery, and features rows of swimmers in the river beyond the wooden pier crossing the middle of its canvas.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is now in Stockholm, and that below, most similar to Monet’s, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland; the third (not shown) is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

That same summer, Frédéric Bazille started painting a smaller group of young men swimming.

Bazille began this Summer Scene, also known as Bathers, when he was on holiday in Montpellier during the summer of 1869. He had already made a series of compositional studies, from as early as February that year, but when he was working on the canvas, he didn’t find it easy going.

He eventually opted for a composition based on strong diagonals, in which the bathers in the foreground are in shade, while the two wrestlers in the distance are lit by sunshine. The landscape background was painted from the hot green mixture of grass with birch and pine trees, typical of the banks of the River Lez. He completed this painting in early 1870, and it was accepted for the Salon of that year, where it was well-received by the critics. Later that year, he was killed in the Franco-Prussian War.

On the other side of the Atlantic, swimmers also earned their place in the history of art.

In 1885, Thomas Eakins painted Swimming (The Swimming Hole), appreciated today as one of the most important paintings in American art, and a masterpiece in the depiction of human form. There’s a deep irony in his choice of subject, that Eakins undoubtedly recognised. The same public who were shocked at a painting of naked people, or painting nude models in an art class, were quite used to seeing naked men swimming, even in public places. That was an accepted norm, so long as you didn’t take it into the studio or art class. This work was commissioned, and perhaps inevitably was refused, although the artist was still paid in full.

George Bellows’ Forty-two Kids from 1907 shows unruly youths at play by the water, in apparent homage to Eakins’ Swimming, restaged in this urban setting.

Several of the French artists who had moved to the Midi (the south of France) were experimenting with the use of photography, and this appears to have influenced Henri-Edmond Cross in his Bathers or Happy Bathing, which he started painting in 1899 and completed in 1902. Despite his chroma nearing Fauvist levels, Cross has retained his subtlety in the gradation and transition of colour.

Also in 1902, Lovis Corinth visited the south coast of the Baltic, where he painted Swimming in Horst – Ostsee, now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Back in warmer waters, Joaquín Sorolla’s The White Boat, Jávea, was painted during his summer campaign on the coast to the south of Valencia in 1905.

Among the few paintings of Maurice Denis featuring nudes is Wave from 1916, with their forced classical poses.

Finally, one of Aksel Waldemar Johannessen’s earliest surviving paintings is a startling view of two swimmers.

Man on a Diving Board from 1912 shows a well-muscled man in bathing trunks bending forward as he sits on the end of a diving board. Below him, just under the surface of the water, is a young woman wearing a bright red costume, including a hat.

On all good maps of buried treasure, X marks the spot, so for the letter x in this alphabet of landscape painting, I’ll consider some fine paintings of the Palace of Westminster (better known as the Houses of Parliament) on the River Thames in London. For each of them we can determine within a few yards where the artist placed their easel.

Location

The present Houses of Parliament in London, so famous for their pinnacled roof and adjacent Big Ben, are less than 200 years old. A popular motif for painters from overseas, it is well situated on the ‘north’ bank (here, actually the west bank) of the River Thames, upstream from the City itself.

The original Palace of Westminster was a royal palace for Edward the Confessor, just before the Norman Conquest. He also built the adjacent Westminster Abbey (the ‘West Minster’, giving the name), the higher and dominant building until the new Palace was built in the middle of the nineteenth century.

This early royal palace was destroyed by fire in 1512, and soon became the home of the two Houses of Parliament, but was inadequate for that purpose, lacking proper chambers for them. The site gradually expanded, but there was no planning to provide suitable accommodation. It was extensively remodelled between 1824-7, then an overheated stove being used to burn the Exchequer’s store of wooden tally sticks set the buildings alight on 16 October 1834, and they quickly burnt to the ground.

While the Houses of Commons and Lords met in temporary accommodation, the current buildings were constructed to the designs of Charles Barry, in Perpendicular Gothic style. Most of the building work was completed by 1860. Although the site suffered bomb damage during the Second World War, the main buildings remain much as originally constructed.

Challenge

The most famous views of the current Palace of Westminster are of course from the river, with its distinctive Elizabeth Tower housing Big Ben, at the right. At the opposite end, to the south-west of the site, is the larger and higher Victoria Tower, and the middle of the waterfront has the smallest spire-like Central Tower.

The River Thames is an invaluable compositional aid when painting the Palace, but being quite broad at this point puts considerable distance between the painter and the buildings. This is exaggerated when the view is made over a diagonal across the river, such as from Lambeth Palace.

The river also brings its own lighting effects, particularly fog. Until the use of coal fires died out in London during the 1950s and 1960s, smoke and fog often combined to produce smog; when thin, its colour could enhance views, although smogs were also responsible for disease and many deaths.

Today this section of the River Thames has very little goods traffic, London’s upper docks having closed between 1960-90. The nineteenth century was a period of particularly heavy trade, though. The major enclosed basins were all situated downstream of Waterloo Bridge, and well away from Westminster, with smaller vessels plying their trade along the section in front of the Palace. Now most of the vessels are carrying passengers, either using the river as a rapid means of crossing the city, or as tourists.

Paintings

Samuel Scott’s Westminster from Lambeth, with the Ceremonial Barge of the Ironmongers’ Company (c 1745) shows this section of the River Thames on a windy day, with showers not far away. Teams of rowers pull their boats out to attend to the ceremonial barges in the foreground, reminiscent of Venetian boat ceremonies. The opposite bank shows, from the left, the imposing twin towers of Westminster Abbey, the old Palace almost hidden behind trees, and Westminster Bridge.

This was painted from Lambeth Palace (marked ① on the map). At this time, this stretch of the Thames was shown in plenty of topographical views, many of which were then engraved and printed. Scott’s view has more to it than those, with the action on the river, and its wonderful sky.

Taken from a similar location on the ‘south’ bank of the river as Scott’s painting, Canaletto’s The River Thames looking towards Westminster from Lambeth (1747) had the benefit of height, probably being painted from one of the towers of Lambeth Palace (① on the map), seen in the right foreground.

Although Canaletto, probably as a reflection of his Venetian works, captures the bustle of the multitude of vessels on the river, even the massive form of Westminster Abbey appears so far distant that it loses grandeur. The tiny old Palace to the right of it, although close to the centre of the painting, all but disappears. Westminster Bridge is brilliant white in the sunlight, and steals the centre of attention. Standing proud of the skyline at the far right is the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral to the north-east.

Paul Sandby’s View of the south end of the old House of Commons (1794) presents another solution to the relative insignificance of the Houses of Parliament: to ignore the river and paint up close against the building. This rapidly executed watercolour sketch of the old Palace gives a clear impression of the building long since lost to fire. It was painted from what is now the northern end of the Victoria Tower Gardens, a public park (②).

When the old Palace caught fire in 1834, most of London turned out to watch the flames. John Constable was in a cab, stuck in the jam on Westminster Bridge (③), where he painted this Fire Sketch (1834), showing the north end of the building ablaze. He did not, apparently, try to develop it into anything more substantial.

With Constable, his arch-rival, stuck in a cab on Westminster Bridge, JMW Turner was still on the ‘south’ bank, at the far end of the bridge (④). From there, or rather later, he painted one version of The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 (1834-5) in oils, now in Philadelphia. The two prominent towers behind the fire are those of Westminster Abbey.

His other canvas shows a view from near what is now Hungerford Bridge, on the ‘south’ bank still (⑤). At that time there was no Hungerford Bridge: the first bridge built at that point was a suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in 1845, and in 1864 was replaced with a more massive structure to carry trains to Charing Cross Station. In this view, Westminster Bridge is silhouetted against the flames, instead of being lit by them, and the massive towers of Westminster Abbey appear ghostly in the distance. This version is also in the USA, in Cleveland.

Turner capitalised successfully on this spectacle, although these paintings were not the atmospheric sketches that they might appear to be. A lot of the oil paint has been applied wet on dry, showing that Turner must have worked on each in the studio for several weeks at least.

David Roberts’ The Houses of Parliament from Millbank (1861) shows the new Palace of Westminster during final completion work. In order to show the new buildings to best effect, Roberts positioned himself to the south, probably at the west end of Lambeth Bridge at Millbank (⑥). In doing so he lost the symmetry and regular structure of the building, its towers here looking almost haphazard. From the left and front they are the Victoria, Central, and Elizabeth, the latter just showing the southern clock face. The vessels shown are typical of the type known as Thames Barges, and were probably engaged in bringing materials to the site during construction.

Just a decade after Roberts’ conventional treatment of the motif, Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster (1871) is a radical departure. Painted from the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, near what is now Whitehall (⑦), the three towers to the south are almost superimposed, and aerial perspective is exaggerated by the mist. The river is now bustling with small paddleboat steamers. In the foreground a pier under construction is shown almost in silhouette. The small waves and reflections on the river are indicated with coarse brushstrokes, adding to the impression that this is a rapid and spontaneous work.

Monet started painting formal series during the 1880s, when he was enjoying commercial success at last. From about 1896, almost all his works were part of a series. He started to travel through Europe in search of suitable motifs for these, visiting Norway in 1895, and later Venice. When he returned to London in 1899, and in the following two years, Monet chose a very different view of the Palace, from a location at the opposite end of Westminster Bridge, for his series of 19 paintings. These were all started from the second floor of the Administrative Block at the northern end of the old Saint Thomas’s Hospital on the ‘south’ bank (④), and completed over the following three or four years.

His The Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect (1903) is even more radical than the painting of thirty years before, showing little more than the Palace in silhouette, the sun low in the sky, and its broken reflections in the water.

The Houses of Parliament, Sunset (1903) shows the same view in better visibility, but with the sun setting and a small boat on the move in front of the Palace.

In The Houses of Parliament, Stormy Sky (1904) the sun is higher and further to the south, allowing Monet to balance the silhouette of the Palace with its shadow cast on the water, and the brightness in the sky with its fragmented reflections.

The Houses of Parliament (1881) is Winslow Homer’s faithful representation of the Palace when viewed from the opposite bank of the Thames, to the north (downstream) of the end of Westminster Bridge (⑧). The tide is high under the arches of Westminster Bridge, and small boats are on the river. This classic watercolour makes an interesting contrast with Monet’s later oil paintings: Homer provides little more detail, the Palace being shown largely in silhouette, but works with the texture of the paper and careful choice of pigment to give granularity. He provides just sufficient visual cues to fine detail, in the lamps and people on Westminster Bridge, and in the boats, to make this a fine example of masterful watercolour.

Tom Roberts’ Fog, Thames Embankment (1884) is painted from a similar location to Monet’s early The Thames below Westminster (1871), on the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge (⑦), but is cropped much more tightly, cutting off the tops of the Victoria and Elizabeth Towers. The Palace and first couple of arches of Westminster Bridge appear in misty silhouette, with moored barges and buildings on a pier shown closer and crisper. He renders the ruffled surface of the river with coarse brushstrokes, but differently from those of Monet.

In Childe Hassam’s Houses of Parliament, Early Evening (1898), the sun has already set, and he is viewing the Palace in the gathering dusk from a point on the opposite (‘south’) bank, perhaps not as far south as Lambeth Palace (⑨). The Victoria Tower is prominent in the left of the painting, the Central Tower is in the centre, and the most distant Elizabeth Tower is distinctive with its illuminated clock face. Moored boats in the foreground provide the only other detail. His rough facture gives a textured surface to the water.

Emile Claus’s Sunset over Waterloo Bridge (1916) probably doesn’t quite include the Palace, because of its northerly viewpoint; it was painted from a location on the north bank of the Thames slightly to the east of Waterloo Bridge (⑩), the north end of which is prominent, and looks south-west into the setting sun, up river. Claus painted several views of Waterloo Bridge while he was in London, but doesn’t appear to have attempted any formal series, such as Monet’s, which also included a series of Waterloo Bridge.

Claus isn’t formulaic in his treatment. He uses billowing clouds of steam and smoke to great effect, and his inclusion of the road, trees and terraces in the foreground, on the Embankment, provides useful contrast with the crisp arches of the bridge, and the vaguer silhouettes in the distance. Like Monet’s series, this is likely to have been painted from a temporary studio inside a building.

Rain (2006) is one of two views of the Palace painted en plein air that year by Simon Kozhin; the other shows Elizabeth Tower and the Palace from the north, the viewpoint being on the Embankment just to the north of the end of Westminster Bridge. This view is less conventional, though, in showing the north end of the Palace on a dull, wet day, a tourist kiosk in the centre foreground, and the contorted branches of leafless trees beside it. The two prominent towers shown are the Central (mid left) and Victoria (centre) Towers, with their decoration delicately hinted in colour. Although quite detailed and thoroughly realist, reflections of the kiosk lighting on the wet road surface are painterly. This was painted from the pavement outside Portcullis House, close to the entrance to Westminster Underground Station (⑪).

In this alphabet of landscape painting, we’ve covered two of the four ancient elements, in earth and various bodies of water, but not yet touched on air. Therefore the letter w is for wind, a real challenge to paint.

The most florid paintings of wind are in seascapes, where its effects are most immediate.

JMW Turner was one of the great masters of the shipwreck/storm maritime scene. My favourite example is this Snow Storm, Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). This was the work for which it was claimed that Turner had himself lashed to the mast so that he could observe the storm properly, almost certainly false and quite unnecessary anyway: as a seasoned Channel traveller, Turner would have had ample previous experience. This also shows one of Turner’s most distinctive features in painting storms, the vortex, with his subject seen in its central eye. Although not exactly natural, it has proved atmospheric.

Peder Balke takes advantage of the rich clues provided in The Harbor at Skjervøy (c 1844-46). In this small fishing port in Troms, in the far north of Norway, the wind fills the sky with wheeling seabirds, heels the yachts, turns the sea white from breaking waves, and drives distant smoke almost horizontally.

Clarkson Frederick Stanfield made his reputation from marine paintings showing the effects of wind and waves. In the summer of 1843, he toured the Netherlands, finding fresh motifs for his oil paintings, including Oude Scheld – Texel Island, Looking towards Nieuwe Diep and the Zuider Zee, completed in his studio the following year. Its fragmented clouds are paralleled by the frequent small waves, together building the effect of a brisk offshore breeze. The critics loved it.

Late in his career, Gustave Courbet’s coastal paintings came to concentrate on waves breaking on the beach, as in his Autumn Sea from 1867, where two sailing boats are the only forms to punctuate its horizon. They are heeling in the wind, which is also starting to blow the tops off the waves, as those dirty clouds scud rapidly across the sky.

On land, though, the painter has to work harder to convince the viewer, enlisting the help of trees and their foliage, and even washing hung out to dry.

Thomas Gainsborough’s sketchy Landscape with Cottage and Church (1771-72) is one of the first works to use angled highlights over the foliage of trees to make them appear as if they’re moving in the wind, and its style was far ahead of its time.

Although trees are a help when depicting wind, Daubigny’s undated October manages very well with the tell-tale smoke rising from burning stubble.

Gustave Courbet shows how a ‘leaning’ sky can amplify the windswept branches, in The Gust of Wind from about 1865.

Although it depicts more extreme conditions, Jean-François Millet’s Gust of Wind from 1871-73 must be the canonical painting of a storm. Its lone and distant figure is being blown almost double, as he’s nearly struck by a large branch torn from the tree to the left. Indeed, that tree is being uprooted, and its leaves pepper the storm sky at dawn.

Antônio Parreiras’ wonderful Ventania (The Windstorm) (1888) is not as extreme, but just as eloquent, again using a leaning sky to accentuate the arcs formed by the trees.

With the Impressionist emphasis on transient effects of light rather than weather, their paintings tend to be more subtle again, as shown in Claude Monet’s Poplars (Wind Effect) from 1891.

Some of the most effective aids for the depiction of wind are flags and drying washing. While Sisley used the former, Gustave Caillebotte painted two views in which a washing line gives the strongest clue as to the wind. This is his Laundry Drying, Petit Gennevilliers (1892), the windier of the two.

Following his time at Cullercoats in England painting fisherfolk there, Winslow Homer’s simple and effective watercolour of Hurricane, Bahamas (1898) should come as no surprise.

Although not famous as a landscape painter, Franz von Stuck’s Storm Landscape (c 1920) leaves the viewer in no doubt.

Two hundred years ago today, on 12 July 1824, the French artist Eugène Boudin was born. In the first of these two articles celebrating his life and work, I looked at his formative influence on French Impressionism, in particular his mentorship of the young Claude Monet. This culminated in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, where Boudin showed a total of thirteen works. However, his career appeared little affected by the event, and he didn’t return to show his work at the group’s later exhibitions, instead concentrating on achieving success in the Salon, and improving his marketing.

He continued to make painterly oil sketches in front of the motif, such as this of Washerwoman near Trouville from 1872-76, featuring another of his wonderful skies.

He sketched the Beach at Trouville repeatedly. This view is from 1880.

The following year he painted this view of the Bridge over the Touques at Trouville (1881), seen at low tide. This modest river runs from Calvados to meet the Channel at Trouville. That year Paul Durand-Ruel started representing him as his dealer; two years later the Durand-Ruel Gallery staged Boudin’s first one-man exhibition in Paris, and he was also awarded a second class medal in the Salon.

In Ary Scheffer Place, Dordrecht (1884) he sketched a more urban scene, although still with water at its heart.

In Parc Cordier in Trouville (c 1880-5), under another of his masterly skies, he captures the texture of foliage particularly well. Following his early inspiration by Troyon, he painted many views of cattle and the fields immediately inland of the north French coast.

He painted these Washerwomen by the River in about 1880-5.

In 1885, Boudin visited the south of France during the winter, and from 1890 onwards spent the winter months there, so that he could continue to paint. In 1887 his works were shown in the USA, where he was again represented by Durand-Ruel, and further exhibitions followed in France.

Saint-Valery-sur-Somme. The Mouth of the Somme (1891) is another more colourful view featuring the setting sun, further north-east along the coast from Le Havre.

In the early 1890s, when he was in his late sixties, Eugène Boudin became full post-Impressionist in Cliffs at Étretat (1890-94), one of several paintings he made then of the cliffs and beach.

Once he started visiting the Mediterranean coast, he painted many of its views, including The Bay of Fourmis (1892). Still unpopulated and unspoilt at that time, this is situated between Nice and Monaco, not far from the border with Italy.

View of Antibes. The Quay, Morning (1893) is on the Côte d’Azur between Cannes and Nice, again not far from the Italian border. High speed direct train services to this area had started back in the 1880s, opening access to artists and tourists alike.

Boudin visited Venice several times in the 1890s. Among his paintings there is Piazzetta San Marco in Venice (1895), which adopts the same view and composition as Renoir’s earlier Doge’s Palace, Venice from 1881. This painting is sometimes mis-titled as the Piazza San Marco, which it doesn’t show. The tower is the high Campanile.

Boudin’s health deteriorated rapidly in 1898, and he died on 8 August that year. It’s estimated that he produced over 4,000 oil paintings, and over 7,000 pastels, watercolours, and drawings. But more than anything else, his art formed the basis of French Impressionism, and his friendship with Claude Monet brought some of the greatest paintings of the century.

References

Wikipedia
Rehs Galleries

Bergeret-Gourbin A-M (1996) Eugène Boudin. Peintures et Dessins. Catalogue Raisonné Musée Eugène Boudin Honfleur, Somogy Éditions d’Art. ISBN 978 2 8505 6250 1.
His latest catalogue raisonné is by R Schmit, in three main volumes, 1973, with two supplementary volumes, in 1984 and 1993, all published by Galerie Schmit, Paris.

In a week’s time, I will be marking the bicentenary of the birth of one of the most important influences on French Impressionist art, who mentored the young Claude Monet, and exhibited at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874: Eugène Louis Boudin, who was born on 12 July 1824. This is the first of two articles briefly tracing his career and influence, with a selection of his paintings.

Boudin was born in Honfleur, on the north coast of France at the mouth of the River Seine opposite Le Havre. His father worked on the ferry making the short crossing to Le Havre, and in 1835 the family moved to Le Havre, where the following year Eugène started work at a printer’s then in a stationery shop.

In 1844 he opened his own stationers that also framed paintings, but the following year Millet saw some of his amateur paintings, and Boudin resolved to make painting his future. His shop framed the work of, and sold art materials to, Couture, Troyon, and Millet. It was a centre of artistic activity which attracted the young Claude Monet, who also grew up in Le Havre, to seek Boudin’s counsel and instruction.

By 1847, Boudin had made his way to Paris, where he started to study paintings in museums and galleries. He returned to Le Havre, and in 1851 was awarded a scholarship by his local council to study painting in Paris. His application was supported by Thomas Couture and Constant Troyon.

Until 1860, he lived in Paris, copying paintings in the Louvre, and returned to the north coast to paint there en plein air whenever he could. However, he didn’t apparently engage in the anticipated studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, and remained largely self-taught. He had his first painting accepted for the Salon of 1859, two years later he worked with Troyon, and the following year made friends with Jongkind. Two years later he met with Monet and Jongkind and the three painted together in Honfleur.

On the last weekend in August, 1857, Boudin visited the Finistère region’s largest religious celebration, and made sketches in oils, including this study for The Pardon of Sainte-Anne-La-Palud (1858). These he used to paint a more traditionally finished oil painting, shown in the Paris Salon the following year, where it was praised by Baudelaire.

More typical of his early finished paintings, The Beach (1864) shows an assorted gathering beneath one of his wonderful skies. These became such a feature of his work that Corot dubbed him ‘master of the skies’.

The Beach at Villerville (1864) shows a dusk setting unusual among his beach paintings. This is set in another small seaside community between Trouville and Honfleur.

Boudin travelled from Paris to paint On the Beach, Dieppe in 1864.

For a while, Boudin painted celebrities including Princess Pauline Metternich on the Beach (1865-7) when they visited the seaside around Honfleur and Le Havre, but as he became more successful in the Salon, he dropped these opportunistic sketches.

He also painted many ports, ships and boats, and riverside scenes, such as Village by a River (c 1867), whose location remains uncertain.

His oil sketches, here of a Lady in White on the Beach at Trouville (1869), were amazingly loose and painterly, and clear inspiration to Claude Monet and the Impressionists more generally.

He started to achieve commercial success in 1864, his income peaking in 1872, but declining thereafter. His friendship with and support to Monet resulted in him being invited to take part in the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874. His first entry in its catalogue could be any of three paintings.

The first two, both known as Camaret, Le Toulinguet (c 1871) and showing almost identical views, include the version above in a private collection, and another now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (not shown). Boudin painted at Camaret, in Brittany, each year between 1870 and 1873.

The third possibility is this, Camaret, Le Toulinguet (1872), in a private collection.

He also painted scenes of local people and their activities along the northern coast, such as this Fishermen’s Wives at the Seaside (1872).

According to the exhibition catalogue, Boudin showed a total of thirteen works in the First Impressionist Exhibition in Nadar’s studio in Paris, described as:

• Le Toulinguet, côtes de Camaret, Finistère (see above),
• Shore at Portrieux, Côtes du Nord (two paintings),
• Four pastel sky studies,
• Two other pastel studies,
• Four watercolours of the beach at Trouville.

Quite a few of his watercolours have survived, and appear mostly quick plein air studies anticipating more substantial works in oil. Sadly, most of his pastels seem to have been lost, although this suggests that he used the medium relatively often.

References

Wikipedia
Rehs Galleries

Bergeret-Gourbin A-M (1996) Eugène Boudin. Peintures et Dessins. Catalogue Raisonné Musée Eugène Boudin Honfleur, Somogy Éditions d’Art. ISBN 978 2 8505 6250 1.
His latest catalogue raisonné is by R Schmit, in three main volumes, 1973, with two supplementary volumes, in 1984 and 1993, all published by Galerie Schmit, Paris.