North of Paris (Road Scholar Trip #3)
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| Louvre |
Third installment of blog on Road Scholar trip: The
Impressionists – A Retrospective, June 10 - 23, 2012.
In GIVERNY we visited Monet’s lovely home and spectacular
gardens, including the famous waterlilies. The gardens are cared
for by 10 gardeners. Monet had two children with his wife
Camille. After she died, he married Alice Hoschedé who had six
children with her first husband. The interior of Monet’s house
looked Scandinavian to me, with a yellow dining room table, 12 yellow chairs and
yellow walls, and blue tiles in the kitchen. The walls on the
2nd floor were covered with Japanese prints, which Monet
loved. He bought his first one at age 16. After
leaving the house and gardens, our group walked along Rue Claude Monet behind
his house to Baudy restaurant
where we had lunch. During Giverny’s glory days from 1887-1914,
“Ancien Hotel Baudy” (the original name on the sign outside the restaurant) was
the center of artistic life, with studio spaces and gardens where Monet met his
artist friends -- Cezanne, Renoir, Rodin, Sisley, and American artists Mary
Cassatt, Lilla Cabot Perry, Theodore Robinson, John Breck, and Theodore
Butler. Lilla Cabot Perry was greatly influenced by the
Impressionist movement. Monet was her mentor. She
bought a house next to his and lived there for nine summers.
After lunch we walked farther along Rue Claude Monet to
visit the small Sainte-Radegonde
Church where Monet’s family celebrated their religious events.
The church traces its origins back to the Middle Ages, and in the
15th century was built partly in Romanesque style.
Monet and his family are buried in the cemetery there, and his grave is
marked with a large white cross. To Monet’s chagrin, his
stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé
married American painter Theodore Butler. Theodore Robinson’s
painting, “The Wedding March,” shows their wedding procession, which
proceeded from the town hall to Saint-Radegonde Church in July 1892.
(The painting is in the Terra Foundation for American Art in
Chicago.)
On our way to Rouen we visited Mrs. Michele Ratel, a local Impressionist
painter, at her studio and gallery in Poses, a village in Normandy along the
Seine River -- a lovely setting with a profusion of magnificent white, red and
pink roses (plus other flowers) outside her studio. We could
choose a postcard of one of her many paintings as a gift from Road Scholar; I
chose a scene of red poppies.
In ROUEN we visited Rouen Cathedral which Monet
painted 70 times, and saw the building across from it where he did the
painting. We visited the site where Joan of Arc was burned at the
stake – she actually died from asphyxiation from the smoke. A
church with beautiful stained glass windows was built nearby in her
honor. (In Paris high up on the Basilica of Sacre Coeur was a
statue of her on her horse.) We visited the bustling outdoor
marketplace nearby selling fresh vegetables, fruits, fish, meat, etc.
We visited the stunning coastline of ÉTRETAT on
the northwest coast of Normandy on the English Channel, which is noted for
cliffs that extend into the sea. The end of one cliff, hollowed
out by nature, is called “Aiguille d’Étretat” -- the needle of Étretat.
Both Monet and Jongkind, a Dutch Impressionist artist, painted this
scene. On the boardwalk stood a reproduction of Monet’s painting
of it with his name and year it was painted. (Other sites in
France also displayed reproductions of paintings by famous artists – an
interesting and thoughtful addition.)
In the charming seacoast village of HONFLEUR we
visited the Boudin
Museum with Eugene Boudin’s shoreline paintings of people sitting along
beaches in the late 1800s.
On our return to Rouen, we visited the Museé des Beaux Arts in
Rouen, which has many French Impressionist paintings, including one I
especially liked, “Dans
un Café,” by Gustave Caillebotte,
a wealthy Impressionist artist who bought paintings from other Impressionists to
help them financially.
In AUVERS-SUR-OISE we visited the studio and
garden of artist Charles Daubigny, one of the painters of the Barbizon School,
an important precursor of Impressionism. The walls in the rooms
were decorated with large landscape murals by Daubigny. In one
room was a lovely piano with two small, double candle holders attached in front
on both sides.
In Auvers-sur-Oise we also visited the burial site of Van
Gogh and his brother Theo in a large cemetery. There are still
unused burial plots around Van Gogh’s burial site if other people want to be
buried near him.
Carol Farmer 2012