Eugene Boudin is one of the most important figures in the history and development of Impressionism. He seems to have been the person who first suggested painting out of doors, when he started an art centre at an inn kept by Mere Toutain near Honfleur known as the Ferme Saint-Simeon. Here a group of artists which included Jongkind, Monet and Bazille used to meet, and Boudin would encourage them to experiment with open-air painting. Boudin took up painting at the suggestion of Millet and Troyon about 1848. He began by producing a series of pastels and watercolour sketches invariably painted out of doors, which he later worked up into canvases.  Boudin then, was really responsible for the beginning of Impressionism. Now what was needed was to specify the aims and methods of the new movement and to gather group artists together, who would subscribe to its tenets - painting out of doors, direct sensation, fragmentation and broken brushwork.  Boudin is unrivalled as a painter of seascapes and beach and harbour scenes, while a  number of his paintings are sketches of Seine estuary. He showed at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and Durand-Ruel held a retrospective of his works in 1883.

Based on Phaidon encyclopedia of Impressionism, Maurice Serullaz, Phaidon, 1978