Seascape with Open Sky (1860): Art, History and Details

Seascape with Open Sky (1860) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Boudin (French, 1824–1898).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: Seascape with Open Sky
• Date: 1860
• Creator attribution: Eugène Boudin (French, 1824–1898)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pastel on gray wove paper mounted on thin paperboard
• Dimensions: Sheet: 21.5 x 28.7 cm (8 7/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2020.116

A detail from the museum

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."

Collection credit

Nancy F. and Joseph P. Keithley Collection Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Atelier Eugène Boudin: Catalogue des Tableaux, Pastels, Aquarelles et Dessins (Paris: Hôtel Drouot, 1899).
• Rétrospective Eugène Boudin. Exh. Cat. Osaka: Musée d'Art de Kintsu, 1996.
• Eugène Boudin, 1824-1898: Antesala del impresionismo. Exh. Cat. Bogotá: Museo Nacional de Colombia, 1998.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.