This text is part of the special Pleasures notebook
Rarely has a river played such a decisive role in the emergence of an artistic movement. More than a century and a half after the appearance of the first Impressionist paintings, we are happily carried along by the waters of the Seine, whose sparkling reflections inspired Monet, Pissarro and their contemporaries to create some of their most beautiful paintings.
The great specialist in river cruises did not wait for the celebrations of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 in Paris to embark on the meanders of a mythical river against a backdrop of rural landscapes and cottony skies. For more than twenty years now, CroisiEurope’s elegant, human-sized boats have been sailing the Seine Valley, following in the footsteps of some of the most emblematic places of open-air painting.
It was in reaction to the overly rigid academicism of the salons that Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, like Berthe Morisot, deserted their studios to set up their easels at the water’s edge and capture the essence of the moment with lively brushstrokes. This revolutionary movement turned the artistic landscape of the 19th century upside down.e century, through his innovative approach to the use of light and his strong desire to capture spontaneous visual impressions.
Cruising is cultured
“Listen to your eyes, listen to your feelings,” Marie-France Pille says as an introduction to the passengers who have just boarded the MS Seine Princessquai de Javel, in Paris. The art historian trained at the Sorbonne has been supervising CroisiEurope tours for about ten years now. Between two evenings paying tribute to the guinguettes on the banks of the Seine, this great Edgar Degas enthusiast gives lectures at the lounge bar on the definition, origins and context of Impressionism.
“I am speaking to novices who have never set foot in a museum as well as to people who already have some knowledge of art,” she tells me, as we drop anchor in Mantes-la-Jolie, for a stopover at the foot of the Notre-Dame collegiate church. Many fluffy clouds are already floating high in the sky, and the time has come to take the road to Giverny. It is in this village in the Eure, nestled on the right bank of the Seine, that Claude Monet spent happy days from 1883 until his death in 1926.
Ode to the Rising Sun
Full of memories, the iconic pink house with green shutters of the leader of Impressionism paints a colorful picture. From the dining room with pale yellow paneling to the kitchen with sparkling blue earthenware tiles, through the living room-studio covered with canvases and the dazzling garden in bloom, Monet’s shimmering world is revealed to visitors. But it is the collection of Japanese prints, a real treasure, that leaves the most admiring.
There are over 200 of them, signed by the greatest ukiyo-e artists, such as Utamaro, Hiroshige and Sharaku. As to whether these engravings marked with the seal of the Empire of the Rising Sun influenced Monet, debates still rage among art historians. One thing is certain, nature, at the heart of many of Hokusai’s prints, was the author’s primary source of inspiration.Impression, rising suna founding work of Impressionism.
And there was light
Monet spent the last thirty years of his life painting, at all hours of the day, the changing reflections of water lilies on the surface of the pond in his “water garden” at Giverny. A real obsession that gave birth to the famous series of Water Liliescomposed of 250 paintings that museums around the world are fighting over today. This insatiable quest for the ephemeral moment also led him to make Rouen Cathedral his muse for almost two years.
From 1892 to 1894, the “master of light” painted the Gothic architectural monument in around thirty paintings, always striving to capture the instantaneity of a ray of morning sunshine or a graying afternoon on the same model. Other artists followed in Monet’s footsteps in the Normandy capital, a new stop on our Impressionist cruise. His friend Pissarro notably settled on the banks of the Seine in 1896 to capture the vaporous atmosphere of the port of Rouen and its smoking boats.
Over time, the chimneys went out. The horizon cleared to leave the MS Seine Princess leave the docks and sail peacefully towards a final stopover in Honfleur. Between river and sea, the small medieval town has seduced a cohort of painters, including Gustave Courbet and James Whistler. Beyond its half-timbered houses and its charming old port, Honfleur is particularly proud of its child prodigy, Eugène Boudin, who sketched the first contours of Impressionism, in addition to having been Monet’s mentor.
After meeting him in Le Havre, Boudin invited his sixteen-year-old junior to follow him in his outdoor painting sessions. Without this decisive encounter, would Monet have ventured as far as Étretat to capture the majestic white chalk cliffs or the play of reflections on the sea of the Alabaster Coast? “I owe everything to Boudin,” he confided at the end of his life to the critic and journalist Gustave Geffroy. We are willing to believe that, like a winding river, the vagaries of fate sometimes have the power to redefine the course of art history.
This content was produced by the Special Publications Team of Dutyrelevant to marketing. The writing of the Duty did not take part in it.