Caroline Mills travels en plein air through Normandy, exploring the places loved by Impressionist artists…
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I guess you know you’ve made it as a film star when you have a fancy bathing hut named after you overlooking the English Channel in swanky Deauville. John Travolta, James Dean, Stanley Kubrick… they’re all here. But what of the artists who made their names along the shores of Normandy and helped to put Deauville, and its neighbour, Trouville-sur-Mer, on the map? Well, they get art exhibitions, even an entire gallery in Paris, and their pictures admired and analysed forevermore.
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I am neither professional art critic nor artist; I can only attempt to paint with words and, as a fan of Impressionist art, gaze and admire. Hence, this is no scholarly essay on Impressionism; rather an impression, if you will, of the Normandy landscapes that attracted a group of 19th-century artists who became known as Impressionists, and those who came before and after them. For I can appreciate what it is about the light and colour in Normandy that brought them here.
My tour begins at Cap de la Hague at the northwestern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula. It’s a wild coastline of small, cattle-filled fields serrated by hedgerows formed of hunched, weather-bent trees that look like wind-worn hags. An unforgiving landscape of harsh rocks, and a pale winter light with a single shaft of sun spread among grey clouds above a verdigris sea.
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This is not the landscape of Claude Monet, but of Jean-François Millet, a pre-Impressionist and leading figure within the Barbizon School of painters, who would walk the coastal paths of the Cotentin Peninsula for inspiration. My walk along the Sentier des Douaniers is an ideal introduction. Millet was dubbed ‘the peasant painter’ for his depiction of farmers in the fields. He was born in Gruchy, a hamlet of grey stone cottages coloured by camellias east of Cap de la Hague. From his birthplace museum, I take a 5km coastal walk punctuated by interpretation panels connecting 10 of his pictures to the landscape. I follow the snaking green path to the viewpoint over Rocher du Castel-Vendon – a copper-cloaked lump of rock among the craggy cliffs of Landemer. Millet’s painting of it hangs in the Musée Thomas Henry in nearby Cherbourg.
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Among fields of colourful cabbages and leeks, I venture to the Phare de Gatteville that heads up Barfleur’s harbour on the peninsula’s northeastern tip. Frothing sea spray splatters the tiny country lanes with the tail-end of a storm. The phare, the third tallest ‘traditional’ lighthouse in the world, was painted in 1934 by Paul Signac, who captured the hues of the sea in strokes of mauve and green.
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With a move indoors at Caen to visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts, I have a taste of early Impressionist works. The gallery includes paintings by Normandy-born Impressionists such as Stanislas Lépine, from Caen, who exhibited his landscape views of the Seine at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. There are also works by Paul Huet, from Rouen, who emerged at the birth of Impressionism with a painting of the port at Étretat. And then there’s Poitevin, who was painting just as bathing tourism developed along the coast of Normandy. He built a villa at Étretat with a studio overlooking the beach; his picture Une plage normande, soir d’été hangs in the gallery. But it is sight of a couple of paintings by Eugène Boudin of the beaches at Deauville and Trouville-sur-Mer that inspire me to move on to Normandy’s Côte Fleurie.
Eugène Boudin hang in the André Malraux Museum of Modern Art in Le Havre
The beach at Deauville, which attracts thousands of holidaymakers in summer, is deserted, candy-striped beach bars shut and clouds swirling.
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Boudin, a son of Honfleur, spent each summer from 1864 onwards in Deauville and Trouville and from 1884, he lived the final years of his life here. He was the ‘master of skies’, painting outdoors to capture the fleeting light at speed before it changed. Impossible! For my time in Deauville is spent beneath ever-changing light.
THE CRADLE OF IMPRESSIONISM
And then the evening sun emerges from a squally sky, casting reflections on ripples of wet sand at Trouville, a golden, cream luminosity mixing with greys and blues, lighting up the seafront façades of timber-framed villas. A young child picks up shells, playing beside their mother, dog walkers stroll along the shore, and I imagine the scene as a painting. Life imitating art…
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Though Millet’s outdoor artistry intrigued Monet, it was Boudin who really encouraged young Claude to paint en plein air, not least over a cider and a hearty meal in the gardens of La Ferme Saint-Siméon in Honfleur, where I head next. What was, in 1825, a humble farmhouse hostelry run by Mère Toutain is now a charming, bucolic five-star hotel. It is also a focal point as the birthplace of Impressionism, for it is here that artists Boudin, Monet, Camille Corot, Frédéric Bazille, Gustave Courbet and the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind, along with other friends, would stay (Monet for a whole year in 1866-67), setting up a studio and having a good time under the watchful eye of Mère Toutain, who provided board and lodging beside the winter fire or beneath the apple trees in the orchard in summer.
© JULIETTE BECQUART, CORALINE ET LÉO, CAROLINE MILLS
There are dozens of paintings of or from La Ferme Saint-Siméon more than 30 of them are exhibited on panels in a permanent open-air art exhibition within the hotel gardens. La Charrette Route sur la neige à Honfleur, painted by Monet in 1867, depicts the building that is now La Boucane. A copy hangs in the restaurant; the original is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Dawn light rises above Le Vieux Bassin in Honfleur, the slender buildings upending themselves into the mirror pool. It’s a place that’s elbow to elbow with tourists in summer, but this morning I share the scene merely with a couple of fishermen unloading their catch on Quai de la Quarantaine. Just as the artists did, I stroll through the narrow streets. A self-guided walking tour, ‘Sur les pas des peintres à Honfleur’ (pick up a trail guide from the tourist information office), stops at the spots where each artist set up an easel to paint the scene. But it’s Le Havre, across the Seine estuary, where dawn light is perhaps the most important for Impressionism.
Le Vieux Bassin in Honfleur
It was here, in 1872, that Monet painted a hazy picture of the quaysides, the sunrise and light reflecting in the water. He would later caption the picture for the first of eight independent exhibitions by a group of artists who were struggling to get recognition from the art world – Impression, Soleil Levant. And, so, through a churlish remark by art critic Louis Leroy, ‘Impressionism’ became a thing.
The Musée d’art moderne André Malraux (MuMa) is within yards of that dawn spot. It is home to one of Normandy’s finest collections of Pre-impressionist and Impressionist works, including 125 works by Boudin as well as pieces by Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Maxime Maufra, Jongkind, Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Raoul Dufy brings up the rear with several bold-coloured Fauvist works, including several paintings of local scenes.
FROM COAST TO RIVER
Northeast of Le Havre, I walk the coast path (GR31 Sentier du littoral) from Étretat to view the ferociously vertical chalk cliffs of the Côte d’Albâtre plunging into the sea. Boudin, Courbet, Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro painted here, as did Monet who, at the tiny village of Les Petites-Dalles, hemmed in by a narrow valley between the cliffs, captured the light intimately during a brief stay following the death of his first wife. There’s a silver sheen to the sea on the horizon as I look out from Les Petites-Dalles’ pebble beach, a steely grey infiltrated by rust red upon the water beneath the cliffs, reflecting a landslide that soils the chalk. It’s not dissimilar to Monet’s impression of it.
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It was not only the Normandy coast that inspired the Impressionist painters, but also the River Seine between Paris and its estuary at Le Havre. I move inland crossing back and forth over the river’s famous boucles to La Bouille. The riverside village, only a few miles downstream from Rouen, has attracted artists for years. Sisley painted here (the pictures are in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen), as did Albert Lebourg and Paul Gauguin. A little car ferry chugs back and forth between the riverbanks, with tree-lined chalk cliffs rising behind the village.
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I trace its history from a series of panels placed along the attractive, lamp-posted promenade and into the historic heart, where the affluent would get their hair done while waiting for a steamer to carry them upstream to Rouen. Today, art and craft studios are dotted among the cafés. In Rouen, I stand where Monet stood to gaze at the intricate detail of the cathedral’s west front before I make a visit to the outstanding Musée des Beaux-Arts, which holds the largest collection of Impressionist works outside Paris.
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It includes Monet’s Vue générale de Rouen, as painted from Côte Sainte-Catherine, the viewpoint over the city accessed on a 30-minute walk from the cathedral. My late winter visit means that Monet’s House and Gardens at Giverny are closed, and I can only recall, in my mind’s eye, past visits to see spring tulips, summer dahlias and autumn leaves reflected in the water lily pond. But there is one flower I associate with Normandy more than any other: the iris. And along the lanes and in village gardens as I make my way to Monet’s grave through the winter calm, iris leaf spears shoot through the soil with the coming of spring.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
It is a century this year since Claude Monet, regarded as the master of Impressionism, died. Almost every photograph used to illustrate his life is of him as a white-bearded old man, having mastered his paintings of poppies and parliament buildings, haystacks and home. Yet there is a painting by Boudin from 1864 titled À Saint-Siméon, les buveurs attablés. It is a watercolour featuring four artists, including a 20-something Claude Monet, seated around a table, having a good time. Monet, hair coiffed, moustache bushy and sporting a red necktie, raises a glass – not yet famous and with his whole artistic life ahead of him, dreaming of making a living as an artist. This is how I like to think of him.
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