BOUDIN, Eugène

A backlit effect is the principal characteristics of this painting. The inevitable long dresses are briefly indicated by small patches of colour that help to give the painting its liveliness and sense of capturing a moment of life.

Boudin, the son of a Honfleur sailor, spent most of his life in seaside towns and concentrated on painting landscapes by the sea, everyday coastal scenes. The tradition he was following was primarily an English one, though Boudin did not paint ships at sea. The pictures he painted over the years in his loose, sketchy way did not, strictly speaking, possess any central subjects. Even his market or beach scenes present an extensive panorama of colour and economically deployed line accentuation. The atmosphere is bright, moist and highly sensitively registered. Corot in old age dubbed Boudin “the king of the skies.”

The skill at seizing the ephemeral and noting essentials characterize the views of Trouville painted by Boudin. Trouville was a fashionable resort under the Second Empire.

Boudin, the son of a Honfleur sailor, spent most of his life in seaside towns and concentrated on painting landscapes by the sea, everyday coastal scenes. The tradition he was following was primarily an English one, though Boudin did not paint ships at sea. The pictures he painted over the years in his loose, sketchy way did not, strictly speaking, possess any central subjects. Even his market or beach scenes present an extensive panorama of colour and economically deployed line accentuation. The atmosphere is bright, moist and highly sensitively registered. Corot in old age dubbed Boudin “the king of the skies.”

In the 1890s Boudin, who had once been a mentor to Claude Monet. came in turn under the influence of Monet and often worked en plein air on the Normandy coast. But, true to tradition, he subordinated colour to the molding of form, thus giving his barely delineated groups on the seashore the persuasiveness of scenes from life.

Princess Pauline Metternich (1836-1921) was a famous Viennese and Parisian socialite of great charm and elegance. She was an important promoter of the work of the German composer Richard Wagner and the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana.

She was born into the Hungarian noble family of S�ndor de Slawnitza. Her father, Moritz S�ndor, described as “a furious rider”, was known throughout the Habsburg empire as a passionate horseman. Her mother, Princess Leontine von Metternich, was a daughter of the Austrian chancellor Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich (architect of the Concert of Europe). It was at his home in Vienna that Pauline spent almost her whole childhood.

In 1856, she married her uncle, Prince Richard von Metternich, a son of chancellor Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. Pauline accompanied her husband, an Austrian diplomat, on his missions to the royal court in Dresden and then the imperial court in Paris, where they lived for almost eleven years (1859 to 1870).