San-Marco square in Venice 1895

Here, Eugène Boudin captures Venice's San Marco Square with dynamic brushstrokes. Boudin's painting presents a horizon where the architecture meets the sky, a visual dance punctuated by the Campanile's vertical thrust. Notice how the light plays across the water's surface, fragmented into dabs of contrasting blues and whites, drawing the eye into a fluctuating space. Boudin uses colour to denote form, but also to dissolve it, prefiguring a radical shift in how painters would approach the motif of landscape. The composition, while seemingly straightforward, is subtly disrupted by the lack of clear spatial definition. The structural clarity of traditional landscape painting is eschewed in favor of a fluid, almost ephemeral rendering of the scene. Boudin doesn't so much represent Venice as evoke it, using colour and brushwork to engage the viewer in a dialogue about perception and representation itself. The formal qualities of the artwork invite us to consider how the impression, as a fleeting moment, can contain a world of meaning.