Boudin was born in Honfleur on the Normandy Coast in 1824. His father was the captain of a rickety river steamer and by the age of ten, Eugene was serving as a cabin boy on his father's boat. However when it became obvious the son had no interest in his father's vocation, they sold the boat and set up a stationery shop in Le Harvre where Boudin began displaying his painted landscape sketches. It was here, during the 1840s, that he met and became influenced by some of the earliest artists to paint the Normandy Coast. Among these were Englishman, Richard Bonington, Eugene Isabey, and most of all the Barbizon painter Jean Francois Millet. Millet took him to Paris to study, but it was Normandy that inspired his best work and here, in turn, he was to meet and inspire the young Monet.
|Berck, Fishermen at Low Tide,|
undated, Eugene Boudin