Voyage to Étretat
A Quick Holiday with History
Étretat, beach town, Normandy resort, functions as one of the floating symbols of the beauty of France’s natural environment, with its coast unfurling with a long ribbon of limestone cliffs, punctuated by extraordinary stone formations. The beaches are stony, many hard of access.
Maybe you never heard the name before but chances are you’ve seen reproductions of paintings of the place sometime, likely by Monet, the one Impressionist you can’t miss (even if you try), the painter with three homes in Paris (Musée d’Orsay, Orangerie, Monet-Marmottan) which makes him a very wealthy man indeed. The man of whom Cezanne said, ‘Only an eye but what an eye!’ and a number of other comments he may have ribbed the King of the Impressionists with during one of his sojourns at Giverny, Monet’s country place where he indulged his mania for gardens full of exotic flowers. One is never enough.
Of the many qualities Monet is famous for it’s quantity. He must have painted feverishly, whether at the cathedral in Rouen or in Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare, where he finished around ten canvases in a week’s time. (I don’t have the exact dates.) And Étretat, too, in the golden year of 1883.
The backstory is fascinating, and illuminating about Monet’s development as an artist, based on his encounters with another painter whose work he couldn’t stand.
