Monet's Places
click on the city of interest to aceess information and a picture by Monet
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Argenteuil |
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Bordighera Monet stayed about 10 weeks in Bordighera and painted about 35 works plus painted another 11 works on the French Riviera on the way home before returning in April 1884. |
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Dieppe and Pourville Not far from Rouen, Dieppe has much to boast about. It attracted J. M. W. Turner, Eugene Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, Aubrey Beardsley, James McNeill Whistler, Max Beerbohm, Felix Vallotton, William and Ben Nicholson, Walter Richard Sickert, Matthew Smith and Georges Braque has to have been doing something right. It is also a tribute to the discreet fascination of Dieppe that among the writers who enjoyed it are Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dumas fils, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. In 1824, the English essayist William Hazlitt went to Dieppe as a pioneer of travel journalism. Dieppe remains a highly attractive town, and is worth a visit today for its excellent seafood restaurants, and for the Château Museum on a headland above the beach. Click here to veiw Monet paintings of Deippe. |
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Étretat The natural drama of the landscape provided an excellent setting - for both painters and property speculators. The town rises steeply up behind the beach so that the grand villas - taken by Maupassant, Offenbach and Zola, among others - have spectacular views over the bay and the rock arches, which form a natural frame at either end. In summer the setting sun adds to the drama. The beach, though pebbly, also added a certain frisson to a stay here in the late 19th century. |
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Fécamp Fecamp also has an extraordinarily beautiful 11th-century abbey church whose architecture proved an inspiration in the designs of English cathedrals. Bishop Losinga, who commissioned Norwich cathedral, had been prior at Fécamp. |
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Fresselines Fresselines is a small town near the meeting point of the Grande Creuse and Petite Creuse rivers, a sparsely populated region that had long attracted artists, authors and poets. Monet painted this dramatic landscape in the early spring of 1889 undertaking one of his most arduous painting campaigns. The area is rugged and rocky, with deep valleys and steep hillsides; the climate is harsh, windy, rainy, and cold. Monet completed twenty-four canvases at Fresselines, each one a struggle against the elements and against his own growing sense of physical vulnerability. The Creuse campaign was a turning point for Monet. Realizing that he had to find a place to pursue his aims more efficiently, the artist turned his attention homeward, to the environment of Giverny. |
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Giverny (click here for more information about and his graden at Giverny) Monet's garden was probably one key to his success, a starting point for his fame. We know know that he was an absolutely professional gardener in his time and well admired for his skills. He wrote written daily instructions to his gardening staff, precise designs and layouts for plantings, invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books. Monet often said, "Besides gardening and painting, I don’t know a thing". |
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Honfleur Honfleur (known as France's "northern Riviera" ) is famous for the breeding and racing of thoroughbred horses, and the 8,000 residents include French celebrities who have second homes here.Honfleur is not a resort but a fortified medieval port, and one of the prettiest and most appealing towns in Normandy. The set piece is the Vieux Basin, the old harbour that used to be enclosed within the defensive walls. Now it is a picturesque place to moor a yacht. Honfleur also has a highly unusual church, built in the 15th century after the English occupiers were kicked out. The local craftsmen were shipwrights and had no stone, so they built the roof of timber in the shape of two upturned ships' hulls. From an artistic point of view Honfleur is important because it was the home town of Eugène Boudin and the local museum has a collection of his works, as well as paintings by Courbet, Monet, Dufy and Mozin. |
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Le Havre Le Havre was almost completely razed by Allied bombardment during the Normandy landings and it can be hard to recapture the sense of the old port evoked by the Impressionists. Along the St Andresse beach, there are still plenty of recognisable views - the headland, in particular, was painted several times by Monet, whose aunt lived in a villa on the seafront, and later by Dufy. Standing by the plaque indicating where Monet sat to paint the canvas that gave the movement its name - Impression, Sun Rising - one looks over a car park towards a container port with an oil refinery in the background. Turning 180 degrees one facesFrance's best museum of Impressionist paintings after the Musée d'Orsay. All the big names of the movement are well-represented, especially Boudin and Pissarro, and there is also a strong collection of paintings by Dufy, who was born in Le Havre. |
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London |
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Paris |
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Rouen, a walled city until the 18th century, was named the "the city of 100 spires," by author Victor Hugo. It's perched elegantly along the Seine, France's longest river. Rouen's (pronounced Roo-aw) narrow, winding cobblestone streets are delightfully walkable. In this city, Normandy's signature medieval half-timbered houses stand in the shadow of its soaring and bewitching centrepiece -- Notre Dame Cathedra, with its Tour de Beurre (heavily damaged in the war, but now fully restored). The 9-year-old heroine Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the village marketplace for heresy in 1431. Twenty-four years after her death, Joan was pardoned -- and then canonized in the early 1900s. The cathedral was the subject of a series of paintings by Claude Monet, some of which are exhibited in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Monet created several groups of paintings exploring the color, light, and form of a single subject at various times of day, but his Rouen Cathedral series was his most intense effort on a single site. He painted there in late winter in both 1892 and 1893, then reworked his thirty canvases from memory in the studio through 1894. He began this example in 1893, working in an improvised studio in the front room of a dressmaker's shop across from the cathedral. After creating a coherent ensemble, Monet selected twenty paintings that he considered "complete" and "perfect," including this one, for an exhibition at his Paris dealer's gallery in May 1895. Pissarro and Cézanne visited and praised the series, and patrons quickly purchased eight paintings from the group. |
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Sandvika |
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Sainte-Adresse Sainte-Adresse is a small town located between the big port city of Le Havre and the edge of the pays de Caux. As it was the case for several other (then) small cities of the Norman coast (Étretat, Trouville, Houlgate, Cabourg), Sainte-Adresse became one of the preferred vacation places of the intelligentsia. The rich merchants and ship owners from Le Havre also built or bought vacation houses in Sainte-Adresse. A promenade was built as the continuation of the promenade of Le Havre until Land's End (le Bout du Monde). Sainte-Adresse was renowned for the regattas organized by the Sociéte des Régates du Havre, which still owns a big club-house on the promenade. The promenade and its landing stage (estacade) were immortalized by the painters Claude Monet, Raoul Dufy and Albert Marquet. The garden in the painting belonged to Monet’s aunt, whose seaside villa was near the great port of Le Havre. One can imagine that the seated figures - probably Monet’s father and aunt - are watching the steam ships bringing goods to their home town. Monet is painting not only modern commerce, but the familiar pleasures of modern middle-class life. |
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Trouville Monet stayed in a more modest establishment and left for England in a panic without paying his bill when the Franco-Prussian war broke out. Many of Boudin's scenes of the beautiful people gathering on the sands were painted here, while Courbet typically ignored high society and focused on the empty beach or the fishing boats. |
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Venice |
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Vétheuil The bleakness of Monet’s life seemed to be reflected in one of the harshest winters on record. The thermometer fell so low that the Seine froze over. Once the thaw set in, huge blocks of ice began to force their way down the river, crashing into each other with such force that the family was woken from its sleep. Monet worked throughout the winter to capture this beautiful and eerie spectacle in a group of about a dozen stark and semi-abstract canvases such as The Break-up of Ice, some of which appear to prefigure his later waterlily paintings. |
The Normandy Coast
Thanks to the obsession of French Impressionists and their contemporaries with the seascapes of the Normandy coast, the rock arch at Étretat must be the single most frequently painted geological feature in the world. Monet, returned again and again to attempt to capture the effects of light and weather on the sea-battered cliffs, while Courbet and Eugène-Louis Boudin also painted from this beach. And Pissarro, Manet, Renoir and many others worked nearby.
It was arguably Boudin, a local boy from Honfleur, who was the greatest early influence on Monet. In the late 1850s he persuaded the young painter, whose family had a house in nearby Le Havre, to set up his easel out of doors and paint his landscapes directly on to the canvas. The radically "impressionistic" images of sky, cliffs, sea and beach which, for the next 30 years, he conjured out of rapid brushwork and vibrant colours have become some of the most memorable and popular images in Western art.
Grand hotels were opening to accommodate tourists and rail services from Paris meant that the bourgeoisie could reach the coast in a couple of hours, and count themselves among the fashionable set. The artists' seductive scenes of carefree life on the beaches only made the attraction of the "summer boulevard of Paris" even greater. In fact, the painters had been in the vanguard when it came to popularising the coast. As early as the 1820s Corot and Charles Mozin had already begun to draw attention to the appeal the Normandy beaches by exhibiting their works in Paris.
Visiting this part of Normandy today, however, involves more than just paying homage to a bygone French intellectual tradition. While their British counterparts have gone into decline, most of the 19th-century resorts around the mouth of the Seine have continued to flourish. Only Le Havre, which took such a battering during the Second World War, has lost its essential charm. The coastline as a whole remains as alluring as the day Monet first set up his easel.
the above is drawn from:
Pleasures of the Palette
