PSAT Reading Practice Test 30: Evidence-Based Questions

Questions 1-8 refer to the following information.

"A Quiet Revolutionary," written in 2014

Though today the familiar names of French Impressionism—Degas, Pissarro, Cézanne,
Renoir, and Monet—are nearly synonymous with what we may inscrutably refer to as "great
art", in its own time the impressionist movement was often identified with artistic dissidence,
the avant-garde, and painterly provocateurs. In its development, the impressionist style
05boldly challenged the entrenched principles of French painting, and ultimately transformed
art for most of the Western world.
There is one linchpin name, however, too frequently omitted from surveys of early impres
sionism. Eugène Boudin—a friend and contemporary of the Paris Impressionists—never
described himself as an innovator or revolutionary, and yet his work tremendously influ
10enced the transmigration of impressionism from the walls of radical art galleries to those of
homes and businesses throughout Europe.
Primarily, Boudin painted beach scenes on the shores of Brittany and Normandy. Alongside
Monet, he was among the first of the impressionists to embrace painting en plein air, and
he was also one of very few artists to show canvases in all eight of the Paris Impressionist
15Exhibitions. But despite his proximity to the avant-garde, Boudin's work remained, for the
most part, conspicuously marketable throughout his career.
Employing slightly subtler brushstrokes than most of his counterparts, Boudin focused his
labors on capturing the tranquil, shore-side recreations of bourgeois vacationers. Around this
time it was becoming fashionable among the middle-class to possess commemorative depic
20tions of the places one had traveled, and Boudin managed to fill this niche masterfully.
By painting the idle vacationers from behind, and obscuring any visible faces in the impres
sionist-landscape style, his patrons could purchase premade a work articulating the mood,
activity, colors and locale of their holiday without the monetary and temporal obstacles of a
traditional, commissioned painting. For comparison, Renoir's painting of models from the
25rear—far from making the work more commercially viable—was executed as a stylistic affront
to classical notions of portraiture. Suffice it to say that Boudin's mercantile techniques were,
at least among the impressionists, rather unique.
Boudin's beachscapes made French impressionism not only familiar to the masses, but
pleasing and even preferable. But that is not to say that his talents were inferior to those of
30the other preeminent impressionists. During his lifetime Boudin's work was well respected
among the artistic elite; fellow landscape painter Jean-Baptiste Corot described him as "the
master of the sky", and the poet Baudelaire was a lifelong admirer of his paintings. Monet
himself cited Boudin as a profound influence on his early work.
More recently Boudin has garnered attention for his less common—and far less popular—
35paintings depicting the seaside labors of working-class men and women. Though these works
brought him very little financial profit, it is known that he was exceptionally fond of them.
Having worked as a bay fisherman in his youth, it has been claimed that Boudin was perhaps
somewhat ashamed of his reputation as painter of "les gens de la mode." In any case, these
works provide us with a compelling contrast to those of the languorous, well-to-do beach-
40goers; and together they provide a rare, panoptical insight into the full social spectrum of
French life by the sea in the mid-to-late 19th century.