by “I’m here every day, the sky and the sea are different,” says Anastasia Kharchenko, as she incessantly drizzles on our umbrellas. “Sometimes you can’t even see the horizon because it’s foggy, but some months the colors are just amazing.”
We are standing on a grassy road above the town of Étretat on Normandy’s wind-sculpted Alabaster coast, its rugged chalk cliffs overlooking the wild waters of the English Channel. Kharchenko is the head of cultural partnerships at the Jardins d’Étretat, a cluster of intricately designed gardens that twist and curve down the hill, filled with whimsical neo-futuristic art installations. I apologize for bringing the gloomy English weather, as we look towards Étretat’s famous chalk arch and needle rock formations, stretching from the cliffs like a hand leaning lazily into the raging waves below.
Claude Monet was a regular visitor here in the late 19th century and painted this dramatic coastline just north of Le Havre over 100 times, precisely because these capricious weather conditions added so much atmosphere to his work. But while Monet and the rest of the emperors were famous for their ethereal depictions of outdoor life here and in the noble Normandy countryside, their work was seen together for the first time, 150 years ago, inside photography studio in Paris.
Feel the sunlight shining across works by Renoir and Pissaro for a museum with the largest impressionist collection outside of Paris.
This band of artistic revolutionaries (including Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne) staged their pioneering impressionist exhibition in April 1874. This year, the Normandie Impressioniste 2024 festival – starting 22 March – is being hosted this year. a range of events to celebrate the 150th anniversary of this significant artistic moment, with shows in the seaside resort of Deauville, Caen and many others across the region.
One of the works exhibited in 1874 was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, a hazy, loosely-brushed depiction of the industrial port of Le Havre with the red morning sun reflecting on the water. Painted in 1872, it is considered the first impressionist painting and became famous largely thanks to the scathing remarks of the critic Louis Leroy, who unknowingly coined the term “impressionism” in a review published in the magazine Le Charivari the 25 April 1874: “Impression, I was sure of it. The preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.”
Monet grew up in Le Havre, and at first glance the modern city is just as dreamy a cradle of impressionism as one could imagine. After taking a two-hour train ride west of Paris, I emerge from Le Havre station into the stocky and spacious Cours de la République. The tram to my hotel glides along the wide Boulevard de Strasbourg, flanked by an orderly mass of concrete flats – the result of earlier buildings destroyed by allied bombs targeting Nazi posts in September 1944. Come after the second world war, architect and concrete master Auguste Perret was charged with rebuilding Le Havre quickly and cheaply.
By the time Perret’s work was completed in the 1960s, the city’s stark grid of blocky streets was creating the new centre As a result of Le Havre Le Havre was cruelly known as “Stalingrad-on-Sea”. But context is everything, and the longer I spend here, the more specific and unique it feels. Nowhere I’ve seen in France looks like this. Its straight lines and orderly feel have a strange charm, not too dissimilar to some Japanese cities, and its modern appearance was finally recognized by Unesco in 2005.
“Here, we say Normandy is the birthplace of impressionism,” says my guide Lise Legendre, as we stroll along the sea-sprung boardwalk of the Le Havre neighborhood in Saint Adresse, where Monet lived and whose permanent panels show impressionist works from the 19th century. to make great comparisons with the current landscape.
“But to become famous and live off their art, they couldn’t do that here,” says Legendre. “They had to go to Paris. That’s how we connect Normandy and Paris. We are very diplomatic.”
Paris was the dream, but Monet found himself and his style here. Hillside houses fall on this corner of Le Havre’s undulating pebble beach, and glass-fronted bistros prepare for the summer season on the boardwalk. There is a murky silhouette of a container ship at the edge of an iceberg along the horizon, patiently waiting to enter the port. Back home, the Musée d’Art Moderne (MuMa), is preparing fascinating exhibitions, which will open in May, exploring the relationship between impressionism and the formative years of sepia photography in the 19th century, and how those images freed the artists. to move away from real representations of the world around them.
Natural light pours in from MuMa’s large floor-to-ceiling windows, and the sunlight shining across works by Renoir and Pissaro feels fitting for a museum with the largest impressionist collection outside of Paris. In this form, light is a celebration.
“Impressionist paintings are part of my childhood,” says MuMa’s new director, Géraldine Lefebvre, who conveniently grew up on the rue Claude Monet in Le Havre. I ask her why the work of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and collaboration is still important after 150 years. “Because they are pictures of everyday life,” she says. “They are full of life, colors, atmosphere. You can feel the landscape. They may not be intellectual, but they are pictures that people can understand and understand.”
Monet’s obsessive nature took him along the winding banks of the Seine to Rouen, a beautiful colorful cartoon city with pastel-colored half-timbered houses and remarkable for the tall charcoal-black spire of the three-towered cathedral – the tallest in France at 151 meter. He painted the intricate facade of the Gothic Cathedral 28 times in various light conditions, the gorgeous series being one of his most admired. And from May 24, the Cathedral of Light show by the American artist Bob Wilson will be splashing the facade every summer evening, with a soundtrack of music by Philip Glass and words by Maya Angelou.
For now, though, it’s a wonderfully balmy March evening, with T-shirt-wearing tourists lounging on permanent wooden chairs outside. I pass through the zigzagging medieval streets of Rouen to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, where another exhibition is about to open by one of Normandy’s most surprising inhabitants.
David Hockney has lived here since 2019 and his Norman exhibition is a reflection of lush green landscapes and playful iPad portraits of his friends and relatives. It’s free to enter and runs from this month until 22 September, inspired by its location alongside Monet and Co.’s masterpieces.
The biggest exhibition of impressionism in France opens at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris later this month (Paris 1874 inventing Impressionism), but Seine and Normandy may leave a higher mark, whatever the weather.
The tour was provided by Normandy Tourism. The Normandy Impressionist festival begins March 22. Hotel and Spa Vent d’Ouest in Le Havre is double from €115 one room. Hôtel de Dieppe 1880 in Rouen has doubles from €127 B&B. Accommodation was provided in Paris at Leopold Hotelwhich has a double from €154 B&B. Direct trains to Le Havre and Rouen run every hour from Paris Gare Saint Lazare.
