Seascape with Open Sky

1860

Seascape with Open Sky, 1860. Eugène Boudin (French, 1824–1898). Pastel on gray wove paper mounted on thin paperboard; sheet: 21.5 x 28.7 cm (8 7/16 x 11 5/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift 2020.116 Eugène Boudin is best known for inspiring Impressionist artists, especially a young Claude Monet, to paint outdoors. This drawing belongs to a series that Boudin made throughout much of his career depicting seascapes with dramatic skylines onsite. He favored pastel, the powdery medium used here, for its portability and directness, allowing him to capture the dramatic effects of nature as they shifted. The well-known Parisian critic and writer Charles Baudelaire singled out Eugène Boudin's seascape pastels in a review published around the time this work was made, describing them as characterized by "meteorological beauty."