again to eastern Europe, he was despatched in 1401 to Genoa, who in 1396 had placed herself under the dominion of France. Here he was successful in restoring order and in making the French occupation effective, and he was soon able to turn his attention to the defence of the Genoese possessions in the Mediterranean. The energy which he showed in this direction involved him not only in a quarrel with Janus, king of Cyprus, but led also to a short war with Venice, whose fleet he encountered off Modon in the Archipelago in October 1403. This battle has been claimed by both sides as a victory. Peace was soon made with the republic, and then in 1409, while the marshal was absent on a campaign in northern Italy, Genoa threw off the French yoke, and Boucicaut, unable to reduce her again to submission, retired to Languedoc. He fought at Agincourt, where he was taken prisoner, and died in England. Boucicaut, who was very skilful in the tournament, founded the order of the Dame blanche à l’écu vert, a society the object of which was to defend the wives and daughters of absent knights.
There is in existence an anonymous account of Boucicaut’s life and adventures, entitled Livre des faits du bon messire Jean le Meingre dit Boucicaut, which was published in Paris by T. Godefroy in 1620. See J. Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient: expéditions du maréchal Boucicaut (Paris, 1886).
BOUDIN, EUGÈNE (1824–1898), French painter of the
paysage de mer, was the son of a pilot. Born at Honfleur he was cabin-boy
for a while on board the rickety steamer that plied between
Havre and Honfleur across the estuary of the Seine. But before
old age came on him, Boudin’s father abandoned seafaring,
and the son gave it up too, having of course no real vocation
for it, though he preserved to his last days much of a sailor’s
character,—frankness, accessibility, open-heartedness. Boudin
the elder now established himself as stationer and frame-maker;
this time in the greater seaport town of Havre; and Eugène
helped in the little business, and, in stolen hours, produced
certain drawings. That was a time at which the romantic outlines
of the Norman coast engaged Isabey, and the green wide
valleys of the inland country engaged Troyon; and Troyon and
Isabey, and Millet too, came to the shop at Havre. Young Boudin
found his desire to be a painter stimulated by their influence;
his work made a certain progress, and the interest taken in the
young man resulted in his being granted for a short term of
years by the town of his adoption a pension, that he might study
painting. He studied partly in Paris; but whatever individuality
he possessed in those years was hidden and covered, rather than
disclosed. An instance of tiresome, elaborate labour—good
enough, no doubt, as groundwork, and not out of keeping with
what at least was the popular taste of that day—is his “Pardon
of Sainte Anne de la Palud,” a Breton scene, of 1858, in which
he introduced the young Breton woman who was immediately
to become his wife. This conscientious and unmoving picture
hangs in the museum of Havre, along with a hundred later,
fresher, thoroughly individual studies and sketches, the gift
of Boudin’s brother, Louis Boudin, after the painter’s death.
Re-established at Honfleur, Boudin was married and poor.
But his work gained character and added, to merely academic
correctness, character and charm. He was beginning to be
himself by 1864 or 1865—that was the first of such periods
of his as may be accounted good—and, though not at that time
so fully a master of transient effects of weather as he became
later, he began then to paint with a success genuinely artistic
the scenes of the harbour and the estuary, which no longer
lost vivacity by deliberate and too obvious completeness.
The war of 1870–71 found Boudin impecunious but great, for
then there had well begun the series of freshly and vigorously
conceived canvases and panels, which record the impressions
of a precursor of the Impressionists in presence of the Channel
waters, and of those autumn skies, or skies of summer, now
radiant, now uncertain, which hung over the small ports and
the rocky or chalk-cliff coasts, over the watering-places, Trouville,
Dieppe, and over those larger harbours, with port and avant-port
and bassin, of Dunkirk, of Havre. In the war time, Boudin
was in Brittany and then in the Low Countries. About 1875–1876
he was at Rotterdam and Bordeaux. That great bird’s-eye
vision of Bordeaux which is in the Luxembourg dates from
these years, and in these years he was at Rotterdam, the companion
of Jongkind, with whom he had so much in common,
but whose work, like his, free and fearless and unconventional,
can never be said with accuracy to have seriously influenced
his own. Doing excellent things continually through all the
’seventies, when he was in late middle age—gaining scope in
colour, having now so many notes—faithful no longer wholly
to his amazing range of subtle greys, now blithe and silvery,
now nobly deep—sending to the Salon great canvases, and to
the few enlightened people who would buy them of him the
toile or panel of most moderate size on which he best of all expressed
himself—Boudin was yet not acceptable to the public
or to the fashionable dealer. The late ’eighties had to come
and Boudin to be elderly before there was a sale for his work
at any prices that were in the least substantial. Broadly speaking
his work in those very ’eighties was not so good as the labour,
essentially delicate and fresh and just, of some years earlier,
nor had it always the attractiveness of the impulsive deliverances
of some years later, when the inspired sketch was the thing
that he generally stopped at. Old age found him strong and
receptive. Only in the very last year of his life was there perceptible
a positive deterioration. Not very long before it,
Boudin, in a visit to Venice, had produced impressions of Venice
for which much more was to be said than that they were not
Ziem’s. And the deep colouring of the South, on days when the
sunshine blazes least, had been caught by him and presented nobly
at Antibes and Villefranche. At last, resorting to the south again
as a refuge from ill-health, and recognizing soon that the relief
it could give him was almost spent, he resolved that it should
not be for him, in the words of Maurice Barrès, a “tombe fleurie,”
and he returned, hastily, weak and sinking, to his home at
Deauville, that he might at least die within sight of Channel
waters and under Channel skies. As a “marine painter”—more
properly as a painter of subjects in which water must have
some part, and as curiously expert in the rendering of all that
goes upon the sea, and as the painter too of the green banks
of tidal rivers and of the long-stretched beach, with crinolined
Parisienne noted as ably as the sailor-folk—Boudin stands alone.
Beside him others are apt to seem rather theatrical—or if they
do not romance they appear, perhaps, to chronicle dully. The
pastels of Boudin—summary and economic even in the ’sixties,
at a time when his painted work was less free—obtained the
splendid eulogy of Baudelaire, and it was no other than Corot
who, before his pictures, said to him: “You are the master
of the sky.”
See also Gustave Cahen, Eugène Boudin (Paris, 1899); Arsène Alexandre, Essais; Frederick Wedmore, Whistler and Others (1906). (F. We.)
BOUDINOT, ELIAS (1740–1821), American revolutionary
leader, was born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of Huguenot
descent, on the 2nd of May 1740. He studied law at Princeton,
New Jersey, in the office of Richard Stockton, whose sister
Hannah he married in 1762, and in November 1760 he was
licensed as a counsellor and attorney-at-law, afterwards practising at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. On the approach of the War of Independence he allied himself with the conservative Whigs.
He was a deputy to the provincial congress of New Jersey from
May to August 1775, and from May 1777 until July 1778 was the
commissary-general of prisoners, with the rank of colonel, in
the continental army. He was one of the New Jersey members
of the continental congress in 1778 and again from 1781 until
1783, and from November 1782 until October 1783 was president
of that body, acting also for a short time, after the resignation
of Robert R. Livingston, as secretary for foreign affairs. From
1789 to 1795 he sat as a member of the national House of Representatives, and from 1795 until 1805 he was the director of the United States mint at Philadelphia. He took an active part
in the founding of the American Bible Society in 1816, of which
he became the first president. He was a trustee and a benefactor
of the college of New Jersey (afterwards Princeton University).
