Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) was born in Honfleur on 12 July 1824, the son of a harbour pilot. At ten he worked on the steamboat between Honfleur and Le Havre, and when the family moved to Le Havre his father opened a shop selling stationery and picture frames. Boudin worked there, and the painters who brought in their canvases, among them Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet, encouraged him to take up art. At twenty-two he left commerce and began to paint full time.
The Dutch painter Johan Jongkind advised him to work outdoors, in front of the subject, and Boudin made the sea, the beaches and above all the sky his lifelong subject. Corot called him the “King of the skies”. Charles Baudelaire was the first critic to notice him, after his debut at the Salon of 1859. His scenes of fashionable visitors on the beaches of Trouville and Deauville remain his best-known work.
In 1857 or 1858 he befriended the seventeen-year-old Claude Monet and persuaded him to give up caricature and paint landscape, teaching him to love bright colour and the play of light on water. Monet never forgot it. Boudin joined his young friend at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, though he never thought of himself as a radical. He was made a knight of the Légion d’honneur in 1892, and died at Deauville on 8 August 1898, within sight of the Channel he had painted so often.