The Cliffs, the Clouds and the Waves

What motif could be more Impressionist than a view of the cliffs or beaches of the Normandy coastline? And with this year marking the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, we've been to Normandy to take in a show focusing on that very subject. 

  
Impressionism and the Sea at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny sets the scene as you enter, with the cries of screeching seagulls and the sound of waves lapping on the beach. The curators bring you Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pissarro and other names you'll be expecting, but there are some lesser-known artists to conjure with too. 

Partly, we assume, because there are so many other exhibitions about Impressionism going on this year, most of the pictures in Giverny have an unfamiliar feel. The stand-out Monet doesn't show the beach at Etretat, with its striking cliff formations, but the strand and cliffs at Les Petites Dalles, further east, beyond Fécamp. 

Nevertheless, it's very evocative, this impression of a sunny summer's day. Just stand back, let your imagination go to work, allow the sound of the seagulls and the water to take hold, and little by little you'll start to see the bathers, the people on the beach, and those adventurous souls puffing up the steep grassy incline to the top of the downs for the view out into the Channel. 

Or maybe down into the Channel. Things can feel a bit vertiginous on top of those Normandy cliffs. Here's Monet's view of Petit Ailly, to the west of Dieppe. You can just make out the customs officer's cottage at the bottom of the painting. 

This picture, from the late 1890s, has an almost abstract feel, with its curious cropping and blocks of colour, like the purple cottage and shaded cliff faces.

It's not always sunny on the coast, of course. There are plenty of clouds, and quite a lot of rain. In much the same place as Monet's picture above, Jean Francis Auburtin captured the light of the sun behind the clouds creating an eerie effect on the surface of the sea in Varengeville. Yellow Rays at Mordal Cliffs. Symbolism? Well, we saw much the same light phenomenon as we travelled back home on the Dieppe-Newhaven ferry a couple of evenings later. 

The clouds are really rain-laden in Jacques-Emile Blanche's view of Dieppe Beach, a painting that you might describe as bleached of all colour if it wasn't so grey. 

But the prize for the best cloud in this show goes to the doyen of Normandy's coastal artists, Eugène Boudin. There's rather an excess of Boudin in this show -- they tend to be a bit samey, and there are so many we lost count -- but A Squall stands out. 

The two ships appear tiny and vulnerable against the hugeness of that black, black cloud and the vastness of the ocean, with that driving rain about to hit them imminently. 

There's another splendid light effect in this small Coastal Landscape by Théodore de Broutelles, a Normandy artist we've not knowingly come across before. That unusual portrait format seems to intensify the reflection on the water.   

In fact, there are quite a few uncommon names in this show: Maxime Maufra, Henry Moret and Adolphe-Félix Cals, each with their own personal vision of the cliffs, the clouds and the waves.

The sea was a subject that drew the Impressionists and those close to them to return again and again. Very early on, we see a study of boats in the harbour at Port-en-Bessin made by Paul Signac before he was 20 years old. Nearly half-a-century on, Signac was still sketching boats in the port of Barfleur. 

Let's have two more of the great names in 19th-century French painting, who've seemingly quit dry land altogether to focus just on the sea. Gustave Courbet was one of the first artists to create series of landscapes, and this example of his pictures of waves is particularly striking. 

That breaker rises almost like a shark's fin, ready to crash against the shore, in front of a threatening orangey-red sky. 

The sea is calmer in our last picture, but we're a long way from Normandy, in the South Pacific, where Edouard Manet has commemorated Rochefort's Escape. 

Henri Rochefort, a journalist and committed republican, was one of 4,000 Communards from the movement that seized power in Paris in 1871 to be later deported to the French colony of New Caledonia. With five fellow prisoners, he escaped in 1874 in a small boat to the Australian ship you can just glimpse waiting on the horizon. Manet's painting captures a bid for freedom amid the immensity of the ocean. 

By the way, they've not forgotten the lure of the seaside as a holiday destination: Philip Wilson Steer's Young Woman on the Beach gazes out at all that's going on, while six minutes of long-lost 1912 colour(!) film provide astonishing moving pictures of the beach and harbour at Deauville and Trouville, with bathers, fishing boats and steamers buffeted by big seas, dogs on the sand and fashionably dressed families promenading. Impressionist paintings brought to life, in fact.... 

Practicalities

Impressionism and the Sea is on at the Musée des impressionnismes in Giverny until June 30. The museum is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets are 12 euros, though it's free on the first Sunday of the month. Combined tickets are also available with Monet's Garden, just down the road. Give yourself 75 minutes or so to go around the show. This museum is one of our favourite exhibition spaces; it's calm and spacious, quite the contrast with the tourist crush round Monet's lily-pond. 

Vernon-Giverny is the nearest rail station, on the line between Paris and Rouen. If the weather's fine, it's an easy, almost flat walk of about 5 1/2 kilometres from the station to the museum, some of it along the River Seine; if not, there's a shuttle bus between the station and Giverny, costing 5 euros each way. There's plenty of free parking in the village if you're travelling by car. 

Images

Claude Monet (1840-1926), Low Tide at Petites Dalles, 1884, Hasso Plattner Collection, Museum Barberini, Potsdam
Claude Monet, La Pointe du Petit Ailly, 1897, Nahmad Collection
Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), Dieppe Beach, undated, Musée de Dieppe 
Eugène Boudin (1824-1898), A Squall, 1886, Musée des Jacobins, Morlaix 
Théodore de Broutelles (1842-1933), Coastal Landscape, c. 1900, Musée des impressionnismes, Giverny 
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), The Wave, c. 1871-73, De Bueil and Ract-Madoux Collection, Paris

Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Rochefort's Escape, 1881, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay)/Franck Raux