"Swimming in the open sky.

Reaching the delicacies of the cloud.

Suspending these masses at the bottom,

far away in the gray mist, making the azure burst forth"

(artist's journal, December 3, 1856, Louvre Museum).

Eugène Boudin mastered pastels to perfection, exploiting all their resources. Boudin was a painter of the moment, of the inconstant, of the elusive... His studies of the sky were a marvelous and unique “repertoire” of this impermanence.
The sky and clouds merge into the same play of light, betraying the fleetingness of the moment and the incessant metamorphosis of an unstable, uncertain atmosphere...