THE REPRESENTATION OF THE SEA BATHING & WATERING PLACES

the FAMOUS PAINTERS of NORMANDY

d'après E Boudin La plage de Trouville 1876

 

the right bank of the Seine estuary

Under the Restoration and the Monarchy of July (1815/1830/1848), the practice of the sea bathing had favoured the fortune of the beaches of the country of Caux. In August 1822 the trip to Dieppe of Marie-Caroline, duchess of Berry ( daughter-in-law of Charles X ), will be determining for the future of the balneal tourism. Accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting and a large part of her court, she indeed set the fashion for the sea bathing. The abrupt cliffs, the surging sea were corresponding with the romantic vision of the painters and the therapeutic expectations of the bathers, about which many publications praise the benefits of the immersion in sea water. The opening of the railway lines Paris - Rouen - Le Havre/Sainte-Adresse in 1847, marks, in this respect, the establishing of the right bank of the Seine estuary .../. G. Poulet. The painters: Bonington (1801-1828), Corot, J.S. Cotman (1782-1842), Delacroix (1) (1809-1868), Isabey, Turner (1) (1775-1851), then the impressionists, Albert Lebourg, Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Eva Gonzalès, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), in the years 1884-85. Renoir (1841-1919), Pissarro (1830-1903), Walter Sickert (1860-1942), and Whistler (1834-1903) got into the habit of staying there.

In 1873 Edouard Manet (1832-1883) paints at Berck-sur-Mer, near the port of Boulogne where he painted in 1869 le déjeuner (Munich, Neue Pinakothek) and le balcon, 1868/69 (Paris, musée d'Orsay, bequest Caillebotte). Pierre-Auguste Renoir paints in 1879 Pêcheuses de moules at Berneval (Dieppe) and the seacoast near Wargemont in 1880. In August 1883, Renoir goes to Yport to work on a commission for children portrait paintings : Aline and Robert are the children of the mayor of the town, Alfred Nunès, a cousin of the painter, Camille Pissaro (1830-1903). - In the same vein, he will continue to use this theme in Jersey; he paints in September beginning Enfants au bord de la mer - (Barnes foundation Merion Pennsylvania).

The flourishing maritime trade of the seaport town of Havre attracts new inhabitants to Sainte-Adresse: some ship-owners or traders. Alphonse Karr arrives at that time ; he is a famous satirical journalist, an editor of the newspaper Le Figaro. Delighted with this rural village, he buys there a house and invites many writers from 1834 to 1852 ; he makes of Sainte-Adresse a vacation resort prized by the intelligentsia. George Dufayel will be the first to have built, in 1906, a genuine complex on the seaside. His objective is to compete with Deauville. The villas are elegant. The site protected from the north wind takes the name of Nice Havrais. The pier is one of the symbols of Sainte-Adresse. Painted by Raoul Dufy and his brother Jean. Marquet. Monet, born in Paris and raised in Le Havre, has immortalized the Dionysian littoral and coasts. He painted in particular the famous Garden at Sainte-Adresse (preserved by the Metropolitan Museum of New York) .../. ville-sainte-adresse.fr (Ill) Alfred Stevens (1828-1906) sur la plage de Sainte Adresse circa 1884 - Dunkerque, Musée des Beaux-Arts -.

the left bank of the Seine estuary

The advent of the Second Empire (December 2, 1852) will move the centre of gravity towards the southern bank of the Seine estuary . Trouville takes over from Dieppe and the English fashion of the sea bathing spreads there (first advertisement for the Baths of Trouville in the newspaper Pays d'Auge in 1837). Between this moment and 1860, the city gradually becomes a fashionable holiday spot . The beach scenes, the smart ladies with crinolines are the motif to be painted. The simplest manner to treat oneself consisted in taking baths directly in the sea while conforming to the police measures relating to order, decency and safety that the laws of 1790 and 1837 had imposed. In Trouville, a decree of 1857 divided the beach into three districts; men on the right, women on the left and in the centre the mixed baths. Each one was invited to undress in the huts planned for this purpose by the city, the most well-off venturing in the huts into the water.

For the specific care based on sea water, however it was necessary to have an adapted house. In 1868, the decision is taken to build in the garden of the Town Hall a bathhouse for hot baths and hydrotherapy. In its turn Trouville will be competed with by Deauville then built since 1859 in the marsh according to the plans of the architect Breney. The softer climate of the Pays d'Auge, its sand, the less brutal waves will attract and lead to the transformation of the coastal villages into seaside resorts: Honfleur, Villerville. The progress of the railroads is the result of this migration of the summer visitors. The Station of Trouville-Deauville is inaugurated in 1863. Trouville is five hours away from Paris by the railroad. according to - Trouville - P. Mardaga édit. (Ill) Alexandre Antigna (1817-1878) Les baigneuses oil on canvas 62x112cm - Musée Villa Montebello, Trouville-sur-mer. Gaspard Gobaut (1814-1892) Honfleur, L'établissement des bains, les cabines et le bain à la corde,1872. Gouache sur papier 36x44.5 Musée Eugène Boudin

The painters follow the movement, they will fix themselves during the summer months on the left bank of the Seine estuary : Paul Huet (1803-1869) settles in Houlgate, Fauvel farmhouse, Troyon acquires a house in Villers-sur-Mer which he names the Academy of the Landscape, Léon Louis Antoine Riesener (1808-1878) purchases in 1857 in Beuzeval a charming mill, which the company of numerous artists (Berthe Morisot - Madame Édouard Manet - in 1864. E.B./G.) transforms into an artistic circle, Daubigny (1846-1886) in Villerville. Giving up the romantic vision of the years 1830, they invent a more natural, more luminous painting, less inclined to effects and more concerned about values. J-S Klein pg 50. The Municipal Museum of Lisieux / Saint-Germain-de-Livet and art et d'histoire keeps some works of Léon Riesner.

One could expect to see appearing, among these painters of seaside, certain marine painters, faithful in their description of the Norman shores and the local economic and social activities : Isabey is certainly one of them. Its artistic course, its friendship for younger artists such as Boudin or Jongkind, could have led him to practise this painting of sea bathing. It is nothing of the sort. The one who has been regarded for a long time with Boudin as his originator of the painting of beaches, has treated this topic on very rare occasions only. The painting representing the beach of Granville in 1863 is significant; it dates from the time when Eugene Boudin has started to cover the subject... A-M. Bergeret-Gourbin in catalogue of the exhibit Un siècle de Bains de Mer dans l'estuaire de la Seine 1830-1930. pg 8 (Ill) Eugene ISABEY " la plage de Granville 1863 " deposit of the museum of Laval to the museum of Granville / Musée du Vieux Granville (Manche).

In the summer of 1865 Gustave Courbet is the guest of the duke de Choiseul in Deauville; he paints numerous portraits among which The countess Károly - private col - The Girl with Seagulls - private col - The woman with the podoscaphe, - Murauchi Art Museum, Tokyo - > images Webshots, « this bather, boldly tanned, famous in this area, who, " in a bathing costume went away from Trouville to Le Havre, in one of these small boats sharp as a fish, sometimes swimming as she had two fins, sometimes jumping into the water to push her boat. Isn't this beautiful girl in a cockleshell as interesting to be painted as Venus in a sea conch ? " Thore Burger in his critic of the Show of 1866 » in Y. Bayard, Trouville, pg 62. > Jo, La Belle Irlandaise - Johanna Hiffernan -. Met.

 

The painter Louis Alexandre Dubourg does not want to leave his birthplace ; in 1869 he splendidly shows the activity of the sea bathing in Honfleur.

 

Eugene Boudin himself, geographically - his parents are employed on the steamboats of the Co of Le Havre - and aesthetically, will ensure the junction between the two banks of the Seine, between the two visions of the landscape. Heavily influenced by the Romanticism of Isabey, educated to the realism by Millet and Troyon, pushed to express the light by Corot and the Dutch Marinistes, he will invent a new pictorial language, which will make the amazement of Baudelaire and will determine the vocation of Monet. J-S Klein.

(Ill) L-A Dubourg : Honfleur the sea baths oil on canvas, 50 x 86 cm " look like an advertising for the home town of L-A. Dubourg " A. Darcel, Les Artistes Normands au Salon de 1869 à Rouen. - E. Boudin : figures devant le casino de Trouville, 1884. Oil on panel 22x42cm. E. Boudin : sur la plage, l'homme assis vers 1865/70. Aquarelle, mine de plomb, 15x24cm. Cachet de l'atelier bd. annotation illisible à la mine de plomb. Donation Hambourg-Rachet, 1988. The Eugene Boudin Museum - Honfleur. France.

The naturalism of Monet, like that of his Masters Boudin and Courbet, is a physical engagement which gives an other substance to the romantic accents of his ideal. Maupassant gave a famous image of him: " Another time, he took hold of the scene of a shower on the sea with his both hands and threw it on the canvas. And thus he had truly painted rain, only rain veiling the waves, the rocks and the sky which were hardly distinct under this flood " Maupassant"the life from a landscape designer " Maupassant "La vie d'un paysagiste" in Denys Riout, Les Écrivains devant l'impressionnisme, p 376 .../. A. Tapié pg 51.

In Trouville from 1891, the writer - Marcel Proust - will be faithful to the Grand Hotel of Cabourg, during the years 1907-1913, taking the opportunity of visiting the back country by car with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli when he was on the Norman coast . gallica.bnf.fr/Proust. He will meet, in 1907, Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940), one member of the group of Nabi and will be inspired by his conversations with the painter to create the character of Elstir (À la recherche du temps perdu / In Search of Lost Time). Alain Tapié in - Peindre en Normandie the collection - E. Vuillard, Le jardin au bord de la mer. or Le jardin à Amfreville. Elstir is a painter and a member of the group of bohemian socialites known by Madame Verdurin (the patron) as the faithful.

Right bank and left bank the first women with short skirts and trousers scandalize. The players of lawn tennis are dressed with light and soft clothing . The chlorotic girls sat in the shade, looking towards the horizon and lost in romantic thoughts are passed by bold cycle women in knickerbockers, letting the sun tan their face. Images of the end of a century, apparently contradictory, and if they were the same woman at a different time of the season, of the day, of her mood? Ambiguity was not the least trait of character of these women, who sometimes the heroes of Huysmans are fond of, or who are sometimes the saphic women "girls of the future" of Pierre Louÿs and the emblematic heroin of Proust, Albertine G. Poullet.

(1) Images, cartelfr.louvre.fr - Louvre Museum, Paris -: Delacroix; La mer vue des hauteurs de Dieppe / The sea from the heights of Dieppe. Tate Collection; Turner View of Le Havre and the Seine Estuary from the Heights of Sainte-Adresse. Le Havre: Sunset Honfleur circa 1832...

« Honfleur, Saint-Simeon Inn »

  collection of early 20th century postcards

TROUVILLE - DEAUVILLE - HONFLEUR -

CABOURG - HOULGATE ...

* The architect Adrien Jory senior designs a building on a trapezoidal plan with an interior court which he describes in the following way: "This construction made up of four main bodies connected to each other will be placed on the communal plot of land named Cahotte, the first will present its frontage in the north at the end of the secondary road n° 16 linking Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives to Trouville and will form the principal entry of the house; it will be made up of a peristyle, a hall with lavatories; a staircase placed at the back of the hall will lead to a floor of rooms surmounted by an attic.

The first and second bodies of building separated by a garden or a courtyard will form the left wing and the right wing ; each one will be laid out and subdivided into nine cabinets of baths ; these cabinets will be served by a corridor ; the building of the right wing is intended for the baths of the ladies and the left wing for those of the men; all the cabinets will get the daylight in the garden or courtyard.

The fourth body placed at the end of the two precedents will include a central room intended to place a fixed machine of six horse powers to pump sea water 125 meters away ; two cabinets for steam baths with rooms and couches will be installed on each side of this room and will be surmounted by a floor in which the water tanks of supply will be placed.

These square towers containing the tanks of fresh water and cold or warm sea water will give a great suggestive force to this small building. The house will be destroyed at the time of the construction of the new municipal casino and be immediately rebuilt in the compound of this one, in the angle which is formed by the back of the theatre and the large gallery. The baths definitively disappear in the years 1880 to make place to the Beach Hotel." pg 339 - Trouville - P. Mardaga édit.