Eugène Boudin quotes

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. (Eugène Boudin)

I have a confession to make. When I came back to.... the beach at Trouville.... it seeemed nothing more than than a frightful masquerade.... If you have passed one month among the people condemned to hard work in the fields, with black bread and water, and you then find that gang of golden parasites with such a triumphant air, you can't help feeling a bit of pity.... Fortunately, dear friend, the Creator has spread a little of his splendid and warming light everywhere, and what I reproduce is not so much this world as the element that envelops it.

Eugène Boudin

I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes.

Eugène Boudin

To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration.

Eugène Boudin

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.

Eugène Boudin

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.

Eugène Boudin

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.

Eugène Boudin

I exhaust myself terribly to content the world, and never manage to content myself.

Eugène Boudin

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.

Eugène Boudin

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..

Eugène Boudin

I am obsessed with the idea of leaving. I must travel, for that would probably relax me. (Eugène Boudin)

The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jaque, Breton; and that is a good thing.... Well and good: but between you and me, the bourgeois walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas, 'to be brought to the light'... They too are often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come from their offices and from behind their desks... There's a serious and irrefutable argument.

Eugène Boudin

[Venice is] somewhat disguised by the artists who usually paint Venice, who have disfigured it by turning it into a city heated by the brightest and hottest sun. On the contrary, Venice, like all luminous cities, has a grey hue, the atmosphere is mild and misty and the sky arrays itself with clouds, just like the sky of our Norman and Dutch regions.

Eugène Boudin

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.

Eugène Boudin

I shall do other things, but I will always be the painter of beaches.

Eugène Boudin

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.

Eugène Boudin

.. my trip to Venice [during 1895] will have been my swansong.

Eugène Boudin

I find my work increasingly more straining, in particular since I have been trying to finish my studies outside.

Eugène Boudin

Nature is richer than I represent it... Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting.

Eugène Boudin

[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.

Eugène Boudin