Author Description

The channel port of Le Havre played a key role in the development of Impressionist painting. It was there that Monet painted Impression, sunrise, the work that gave the movement its name. Many other artists of the period were associated with the town, from Monet's teacher Boudin to the colourful and exuberant favourite of a younger generation, Raoul Dufy. The beauty of the light on the coast attracted landscape artists throughout the nineteenth century. This was not a simple history, parts of the coastline were rapidly changing with the growth of the port at Le Havre and the emergence of Trouville as the leading seaside resort for the whole of France. It was on this coast that painters first began to paint the explicitly modern life of the tourist and holidaymaker on the beaches, bringing Parisian invaders face to face with the traditional imagery of the forces of the elements. For Boudin, such paintings were an explicit counter to traditional landscapes peopled by the stock imagery of rural peasants.. The painters who worked in and around Le Havre made choices of subject matter and style that were a vivid expression of the contemporary debate on the art of landscape painting. What were the appropriate subjects for the landscapist? And how should they be treated?