Cows in a Meadow

Eugène Boudin was born in 1824, the year in which the exhibition at the Paris Salon was held that would be of great significance for the awareness of the 'Barbizon School'. At this Salon, French Romantic artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault and English landscape painters such as Richard Parkes Bonington and John Constable were exhibited. These confirmed the Barbizon painters in their new vision of landscape painting and confirmed the split between the classics and the moderns. Boudin thus began his career as a painter at a time when modern landscape painters had already made their mark on French painting. Their influence was great and Boudin, too, underwent the inspirational effect of these artists. Boudin often set up his easel on the banks of the river La Touquet to study the cattle, among other things. The further away from the observer, the more the contours of the forms dissolve and the less precise the volume becomes. This suggestive, almost tachographic brushwork comes across as very modern and the work seems to be above all an exercise in painting that, with the exception of the more clearly depicted cow in the foreground, looks like an almost abstract collection of spots and strokes.