The Lens of ImpressionismPhotography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850–1874

university of michigan museum of art

Five years earlier, the photographer Louis- Alphonse Davanne photographed cliffs and a nearby bay in No. 12. Étretat, the Manneporte. Though the differences between their respective repre-sentations of the awe-inspiring coastal landscape in Normandy were vast, the painter and the photographer found that this small stretch of France’s northern coast offered a rich set of possibilities for the production of a new form of picture making, which would transform the visual arts over the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Courbet’s painting was part of an evolving project shared by many nineteenth-century French painters that sought to challenge the traditions of art making with a new visual vocabulary based on subjective experience. In A Bay with Cliffs, the rules of perspective and symmetry are thrown out in favor of a landscape that cuts off the traditional horizon line with a bold, rocky cliff rendered with a thick layer of paint. Courbet eschewed traditional landscape painting in favor of conveying the material immediacy of his natural surroundings. Normandy, with its dramatic coastline and soaring cliffs, provided the painter with an ideal location to explore new possibilities of landscape painting.

In 1869, Gustave Courbet painted A Bay with Cliffs.

3Louis-Alphonse Davanne, No. 12. Étretat, the Manneporte (N° 12. Étretat, la Manneporte) (detail), 1864, albumen print, Department of Prints and Photographs, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

4Gustave Courbet, A Bay with Cliffs, ca. 1869, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund

The Normandy coastline also served as the basis for a new kind of picture making in an altogether different and recently popularized medium—photography. Davanne’s photograph of the towering cliffs of Étretat may look like a simple landscape study. But its crisp rendering of the texture of the rock and the smooth water that surrounds it constituted an incredible technical achievement for a medium whose discovery was announced just years before, in 1839. At this point in the medium’s early history, the process of making a photograph was anything but standardized. The photographs taken by Davanne and many of his peers in Normandy during this period helped to define the emerging genre of landscape and marine photography in a setting full of dynamic contrasts and dramatic natural scenery.

The Lens of Impressionism examines the shared interest among painters and photographers in representing contemporary life and natural beauty along the Normandy coast during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, just before the emergence of what became known as Impressionism, a derisive term coined by a critic in 1874 with the independent exhibition of Claude Monet’s Impression: Sunrise. Monet, who grew up in Normandy, was one of many artists who found there an ideal location for formulating a new mode of painting based on direct observation of nature as well as new, modern forms of leisure. Monet’s Sea at Le Havre, painted in 1868, uses thickly and quickly applied paint to convey the movement of the tumbling wave in the foreground and the constantly churning sea. The artist’s interest in painting’s ability to make a visual record of a quickly changing natural environment was shared by other painters who came to Normandy to explore new directions in art making, notably Johan Barthold Jongkind. His painting, the Quay at Honfleur, depicts the small town’s port as a hub of human and natural activity. As with Monet’s painting, small bursts of paint reveal the speed with which this image was made.

Though this interest in depicting the immediacy of visual perception would later become a hallmark of Impressionist painting, in the preceding decades along the Normandy coastline, it was also shared by photographers who worked tirelessly to reduce exposure times so that moving subjects could be captured by the camera. Early photographic processes required long exposure times to yield a crisp image: any movement would cause a blur. It was especially difficult to represent moving objects with one of the earliest viable photographic processes, the daguerreotype. This direct positive process (there was no negative) that resulted in a unique photo-graphic image required an especially long exposure time. In one stunning example taken by the Macaire brothers in 1851, a ship enters the harbor as onlookers gather in the foreground. The comings and goings of ships would have been an everyday occurrence in Le Havre but for daguerreotypists, the ability to freeze a moving ship on the metal plate was unprecedented.

3Claude Monet, The Sea at Le Havre, 1868, oil on canvas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Purchase 53.22), Photograph © 2007 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

3Johan Barthold Jongkind, Quay at Honfleur (Quai à Honfleur), 1866, oil on canvas, Senn Collection, Musée Malraux, Le Havre

The Macaire brothers continued their investigations into the photo- graphic representation of motion, but it was Gustave Le Gray who caused a sensation with the first successful photographs of waves. The goal of much photographic experimentation in the 1850s was instantanaeity—the ability to take a photograph instantly, without the need for a prolonged exposure time. Waves, perpetually in motion, were understood at the time as the last great hurdle toward achieving such a goal. Le Gray’s Great Wave was as much a technical achievement as it was an artistic one. In the foreground, the wave is captured in the process of unfurling, a technical tour-de-force that challenged received notions about the limits of the nascent medium. Le Gray’s photographs of waves and the open sea, which figure throughout this exhibition, were valued as works of art as well as emblems of technical achievement.

Though photography is often thought of as an inherently reproductive medium that mimics the world as we know it, it is surprising to learn that the illusion of a perfect reproduction of the seen world was the result of manipulations, as is the case with Le Gray’s Great Wave. While the photograph appears as a seamless image, where the sea joins with the horizon in the background, Le Gray actually used two separate negatives that he combined to yield the final photograph. This common practice among nineteenth- century photographers was often used when two very different components of a landscape, such as the sea and the sky, needed to be joined together to avoid a washed-out gray image. Another photographer in the exhibition, Alexandre Eugène Nicolas, went so far as to black out the sky in his paper negatives with ink so that the final print would appear full of contrast, reflecting contemporary expectations of what a seaside landscape looked like.

4oppositeGustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète (La grande vague, Sète), 1857, albumen print, Department of Prints and Photographs, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

4Alexandre Eugène Nicolas, Dieppe Casino, No. 8 (Le casino de Dieppe, n° 8), 1851–55, paper negative, Department of Prints and Photographs, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Normandy underwent an incredible transformation during the third quarter of the nineteenth century, from a collection of traditional rural seaside villages to a popular tourist haven for wealthy Parisians. With the arrival of the railroad linking Paris to Normandy in the late 1840s, tourism in the area exploded. Elegant hotels and casinos were opened along the coast. The mass media of the day, including prints and the illustrated press, publicized the new seaside resorts to which Parisians flocked. Fashionable stores opened in previously sleepy fishing villages. Photographers also participated in the tourism industry, creating souvenirs for tourists to take back home: Eugène Colliau’s cartes-de-visite pictured the principal sites of the seaside city of Le Havre; these were small and inexpensive ways to remember one’s seaside vacation.

One of the hallmarks of late-nineteenth-century French painting would be an interest in urban social spaces such as cafés, bars, and the theater as depicted by Manet, Degas, and Renoir among others. But before these painters gained notoriety, the burgeoning tourist industry in Normandy in the decades before provided artists with a fascinating set of subjects to study modern social habits. Eugène Boudin’s Study of the Beach at Deauville, one of the most fashionable destinations for wealthy Parisians, minimizes the natural landscape in favor of a focus on the people who gather there. Bathing cabins in the background point to the apparent reason for coming to the beach, but it is the social interactions among the people, dressed to the hilt, which Boudin singles out in his watercolor. Similarly, the beach as a site for chic tourists to see and be seen captivated Édouard Manet, whose painting On the Beach called attention to the awkwardness of self-display that took place during any beachside outing.

This vision of Normandy as a vacation spot for Parisians contrasted sharply with earlier representations of life in these small seaside villages. Before the tourism industry arrived in Normandy in the 1850s, artists often represented the land as a timeless idyll untouched by modern life. In his painting entitled A Norman Fishing Village, Eugène Isabey represented Norman fisherman engaged in a traditional maritime activity, unloading a ship. Old houses take up nearly half of the composition, suggesting that the architecture, like the people in the village, were located in a timeless place removed from the pressures of the outside world. Representations such as Isabey’s reinforced expectations of Normandy’s enduring connection to nature and traditional livelihoods. With the emergence of the tourism economy in Normandy, it was precisely this way of life that became increasingly marginalized.

4Édouard Manet, On the Beach (Sur la plage), circa 1868, oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Bequest of Robert H. Tannahill, © 2004 The Detroit Institute of Arts

The burst of artistic activity that occurred along the Normandy coastline in the third quarter of the nineteenth century helped artists across media expand and explore the possibilities of art making. While we generally think of Impressionist painting as a revolutionary break with the art that had preceded it, this exhibition proposes that some of its artistic innovations can be traced back to a small stretch of land on the northern coast of France and the images created by photographers working there.

Katie Hornstein PhD Candidate, UM Department of the History of Art

Organized by UMMA, this exhibition is made possible in part by the Florence Gould Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Michigan Health System, Office of the Provost, Office of the Vice President for Research, School of Music, Theatre & Dance, the Center for European Studies-European Union Center, and Department of History of Art, Masco Corporation, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, the University of Michigan Credit Union, and the family of Dr. Raymond F. Cunningham in his memory. The Lens of Impressionism would not have been possible without the generosity and cooperation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and features exceptional loans from the BnF and the Musée d’Orsay. Following its showing in Ann Arbor, the exhibition will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art.

3Eugène Isabey, A Norman Fishing Village (detail), ca. 1831, oil on canvas, Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hamp-shire, bequest of Florence Andrews Todd in memory of her mother, Sally W. Andrews

coverGustave Le Gray, The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, View of the Cliffs (Plage de Sainte-Adresse, vue de la falaise) (detail), 1856, albumen print, Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Paris, on deposit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Troyes, Photograph: Jean-Marie Protte

back coverClaude Monet, The Sea at Le Havre (detail), 1868, oil on canvas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Purchase 53.22), Photograph © 2007 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

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regents of the university of michigan Julia Donovan Darlow, Ann Arbor Laurence B. Deitch, Bingham Farms Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Olivia P. Maynard, Goodrich Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park S. Martin Taylor, Grosse Pointe Farms Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mary Sue Coleman, ex officio

The Lens of ImpressionismPhotography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850–1874

October 10, 2009–January 3, 2010

A. Alfred Taubman Gallery IUniversity of Michigan Museum of Art

February 21–May 23, 2010

Dallas Museum of Art