Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Eugène Boudin
French; 19th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum (Exhibition: Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism)
55%
Herd of Cows under Stormy Sky. c1881-88. Oil on canvas
Boudin has something up on his fellow non-canonized late-19th-century Frenchman: he seems to have understood that the point in painting was no longer to subordinate facture to the delivery of scenes, but instead to allow paint itself, and the way it's applied, to express things on their own. In this piece, the cows in particular are juicy, and the sky is a tangle of marks. But what Boudin didn't grasp (he was born between Corot and Monet) is that wild handling isn't on its own a virtue, but rather a means to an end. Too, it demanded a sort of organization different from that which had governed older paintings: an organization of strokes rather than structures, of which Cézanne would become the master. Nothing in Boudin's painting really hinges on anything else. Its charms are discrete, not holistic. (TFS, 2026)