Impressions of Normandy: Susannah Woolmer visits an exhibition at the Bowes Museum which explores the relationship between two of the nineteenth century's greatest printers of seascapes, Boudin and Monet

A small on the other hand elegantly conceived exhibition, 'Boudin, Monet and the Sea Painters of Normandy' examines the disclosure of seaside portraiture and seascapes in northern France during the nineteenth hundred in particular the paintings of Claude Monet and his friend and mentor Eugene-Louis Boudin. This exploration of their lasting friendship and Boudin's influence upon the young Monet is fascinating and touching, if perhaps a little romanticised. (Much is made of Monet's debit to Boudin, but the fathomless influence of the Dutch landscape painter Johann Bartold Jongkind is barely touched upon; no paintings of his are included in the exhibition.) However, Boudin's impact on the younger artist's development is in no way insignificant, and the display helps to reassert the position of this relatively darksome painter within nineteenth-century French art.

Normandy, with its dramatic coastline and unpredictable weather, was irresistible to Boudin and remained a constant source of inspiration. As a child he was a cabin stripling on his sailor-father's vessels and with equal reason became familiar with the sea from an early age. After working in a printers' store he set up a stationery business in Le Havre; it was here that he decided to become a painter. He studied in Paris, where he was struck through the still lifes, land- and seascapes of the seventeenth-century Dutch academy and contemporary Barbizon paintings, eventually winning a scholarship to close attention in Paris, Rouen and Caen, before returning to Normandy.

The Bowes Museum exhibition positions Boudin within the tradition of seascape painting that embraced, which subserves to highlight just how a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of impressionism was indebted to the experimentation of earlier northern European painters. Boudin's seventeenth-century Dutch influences are acknowledged with the inclusion of a shipping close attention by Simon de Vlieger and the charming An estuary with fishing boats and sum of two units frigates of 1650-56 by Jan van Goyen

Other contemporary painters and sources of inspiration are also not absent A delicate oil on canvas, Estecade Normande by means of J.B. Corot, features, as do sum of two units Courbet seascapes, including the actual lovely Low tide at Trouville: a pink going down of the sun awash with diffusing dusky light and scattered collection of vapors As a young painter working in the outdoors, Boudin came to know Corot and JF Millet. Corot, himself a firm believer in the primacy of painting en plein air was a great admirer of Boudin, calling him 'le roi de ciels'. Gustav Courbe wearied the summers of 1865-66 in with Trouville and worked alongside Boudin, and later Monet Courbet focussed mainly upon the lucrative area of portraiture in Trouville (which Boudin cast asideed despite being dogged by privation preferring to concentrate on seascapes), on the contrary his paintings of Etretat were greatly to influence Monet who would proceed on to produce a critically acclaimed series of works based around these rugg cropping outs in the 1880s.

The picturesque charm of Normandy's harbour towns of Fecamp, Trouville and Etretat appealed to artists and wealthy tourists alike. A drawing through Cotman and a small on the contrary wonderfully atmospheric watercolour by gymnast Honfleur from the water at twilight (c 1832) help to illustrate in what manner the flourishing public transport a whole and a new rail network allowed painters to travel from the city to the coast with relative ease.

Boudin made beautiful and highly original populated beach sights These paintings are small, elegant and expertly rendered; although they are superficially portraits of the fashionable station (notably one of Empress Eugenie and her ladies-in-waiting, exhibited here, which elegantly documents t fashions of the day), Boudin's real interest was the result of light falling on the figures upon the beach and the composite relationship between light, colour and fabric A seaside watering place (1867) is interesting for the crafty rendering of light through troubl skies upon the shadowy figures below. sum of two units similar compositions, both entitled Beach representation Trouville (c. 1860-74 and c 1860-70) hang together in the nearest room. All three canvases are strikingly similar in the arrangement of figures in the middle-distance against a wide expanse of canopy of heaven tempered by a sliver of sea. However the latter pair are abundant sunnier; in the former canvas, Boudin has captured the twinkling when the sun dipped briefly behind a nebulosity casting a fleeting chill above the figures on the sand. Each painting possesse a markedly different atmosphere thanks to Boudin's exploration of contrasting light results (it would have been advantageous to see them hung side-by-side). It was this remarkable approach to the ultimate parts that intrigued and inspired the young Monet and that he would eventually make his own

Monet was born in Paris, on the other hand moved to Le Havre with his family as a small child, where he grew up earning pouch money by drawing caricatures of the locals. When they met Monet was seventeen and Boudin thirty-three. Boudin, with his sharply-honed perception of arch atmospheric changes and his observation of the myriad events of light on sea and fog colour and contour, introduced the younger artist to the conception of working outdoors and encouraged him to mark from nature. Through his lenient example and influential presence, Boudin helped to shape the coming time of nineteenth-century French painting. Monet wrote: 'if I became a painter, it was thanks to Boudin, He was a man of infinite kindness who took it on himself to teach me. Gradually my organ of visions were opened, I really understood Nature, and at the same time I began to delight in it'.