Seascape with Open Sky

A broad tract of sky rises over a calm sea in this pastel of 1860, made at the height of the artist’s early career and at the very moment a young Claude Monet was learning from him on the Normandy coast. Eugène Boudin, who worked constantly in pastel for the open-air sketching he encouraged in Monet, here captures weather and light across a wide horizon with the loose shorthand that made him, in Monet’s phrase, the master of skies. The small sheet is a mature example of the medium’s role in the birth of plein-air painting.