Monet lived near it, Caillebotte sailed on it and any number of them likely spent time in the picturesque cafes along its banks.
Now one museum in France has set out to show how France’s iconic River Seine was one of the Impressionist painters’ greatest influences.
As France gears up for its first major homage to Impressionism, the Giverny Museum in Normandy north of Paris has opened an exhibition featuring work by a list of Impressionists to illustrate the connection, but it goes beyond that as well.
PHOTO: AFP
It also captures a time when the Seine, which bisects Paris and cuts through the French countryside before emptying into the English Channel, saw its bucolic setting transformed in many areas by industrialization.
Such changes not only altered the landscape and the lives of those living there, but also fired the imaginations of the painters, said Marina Ferretti, the exhibition’s curator.
“The Seine was able to become the birthplace of new painting in the second half of the 19th century because it was an area for all innovations,” Ferretti said.
For the Impressionists, most of whom painted in the mid-to-late 1800s, the combination of industry and leisure along the Seine proved to be a rich source of inspiration, she said.
“It is life itself that they wanted to describe, and in their paintings the clear silhouette of a walker or a pleasure boat’s sparkling sail often gives way to a background of factory smokestacks and metal bridges,” the curator said.
There was the light as well, of course, and its reflection off the water that surely left its mark on the painters who would change art forever.
The some 50 paintings gathered at the museum serve as a prelude to an Impressionist festival beginning in June throughout Normandy that will also cover music, literature, theatre and cinema.
There will be a Claude Debussy opera, a major art show in Rouen with 100 key works on display as well as 19th-century-style riverside balls and open-air picnics.
Among the paintings on display at Giverny are masterpieces from Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Gustave Caillebotte.
The oldest works, including those by Theodore Rousseau and dating to 1832, depict a wild river with sandy banks surrounded by greenery.
However, as time passes, the idyllic scenes are replaced by those with factories along increasingly populated river banks. Stone bridges become metal ones, rowboats disappear in favor of barges.
The exhibition, which runs until July 18, wraps up with works from Fauvist painters Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and Othon Friesz, showing how they, too, were drawn to the Seine before heading for the sunny Mediterranean.
Ferretti said the Impressionists involved themselves completely “in a new world that was sketching itself, hedonistic and confident in the virtues of progress.”
She says that the railroad’s arrival in the 19th century in the cities of Rouen and Le Havre — both located along the Seine — also helped make the river a playground for the Impressionists.
They frequented the cafes along the Seine and some participated in water sports, including Caillebotte who became president of the sailing club in the town of Petit Gennevilliers.
And some made their home near the river, including perhaps the best-known Impressionist, Monet, whose house in Giverny included the famous garden that was the inspiration for much of his work.
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS