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Around 1856, in a frame-maker's shop in Le Havre on the Normandy coast, an older painter noticed the caricatures a local teenager was drawing and told him to give them up and paint outdoors instead. The teenager was Claude Monet. The older man was Eugene Boudin, and the walks they took along the shore, painting the sea and sky straight from nature, later made Monet say it was as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes.

Boudin was the son of a Honfleur harbour pilot and had worked as a boy on the steamer that ran between Honfleur and Le Havre, so he knew that coast in every weather. He became a painter of beaches and skies, of fashionable Parisians taking the air at the new resorts of Trouville and Deauville, with the clouds often given more of the canvas than the people below. The older landscape painter Corot called him the king of the skies.

He showed alongside Monet and the younger men at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, though he never thought of himself as a rebel. On the backs of his beach studies he often pencilled the exact conditions of the day, the wind, the hour and the state of the light, so the weather inside each picture can still be matched to the weather that made it.