Étretat, a large workshop to explore

Lyon. If there was “The Invention of Étretat. Eugène Le Poittevin, a painter and his friends at the dawn of impressionism” (Fécamp, 2020) and “Monet at Étretat” (Seattle, 2021), no major exhibition had highlighted the relationship of this village on the Normandy coast with artists. However, the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon keeps The Wave (1869-1870) by Gustave Courbet and Étretat, rough seas (1883) by Claude Monet, while the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, a twin city with Lyon, holds another version of The Wave (1869) by Courbet and Lunch (1868-1869) by Monet. These four works were painted in Étretat and it was enough for the curators of the two institutions to decide to work together on the subject. While the majestic cliffs known throughout the world are subject to erosion worsened by climate change, it was important to say what source of inspiration this place could have been for modern art and to show recent discoveries about the artists who frequented it.

The curators, Stéphane Paccoud and Isolde Pludermacher for Lyon and Alexander Eiling and Eva-Maria Höllerer for Frankfurt (the Städel will present the exhibition from March to July 2026), have brought together around 150 works, landscapes and some genre scenes, created in this corner of Normandy. The village is known for having hosted the artists already mentioned, but also Eugène Isabey (considered the first to have stayed there), Camille Corot, Eugène Boudin and Félix Vallotton. The curious know that Victor Hugo drew the cliffs, amateurs seek out the Japanese watercolors of Jean Francis Auburtin and admirers of Henri Matisse argue over the place that the summer he spent there with his daughter Marguerite had in the painter’s development.

But we cannot date Isabey’s first watercolors (1820 or 1822?) and we have the same uncertainties for some by Eugène Delacroix: 1840 or 1846, 1858 or 1868? He was in Fécamp in 1829, but did he go as far as Étretat on this occasion? The first painter of the fishing hamlet would be Alexandre Jean Noël, around 1786, if we do not find one day an intrepid artist who would have passed there earlier. Until the middle of the 19th century, Étretat was at the end of the world: the road leading to the cove without a sheltered port – the caiques were pulled onto the beach using capstans which would later become beautiful motifs for painters – was “drawn from 1838”, specifies Pierre Wat in the catalog. In August 1835, Victor Hugo walked the four leagues separating Fécamp from Étretat. More than Delacroix, it is he who, captivated by the “ gigantic architecture » cliffs, established for a long time a romantic vision of this coastline.

An exceptional journey

It seems that no Englishman came to paint in these areas at the time, but the German landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer painted masterful oil studies there around 1836. Watercolor On the beach of Étretat (around 1836), acquired in 2019 by the Zitadelle Museum in Jülich, Germany, is being shown to the public for the first time. The exhibition thus alternates discoveries and expected masterpieces, two main stages of the journey being the Courbet room and the Monet room. Among the revelations, we should mention a sketchbook by Horace Vernet, photographs taken around 1862 by a great amateur, Alphonse Davanne, several of which are exhibited for the first time, as well as a small oil on wood, Étretat, the Porte d’Aval (1899) by Sophie Schaeppi, a Swiss artist whom her master, the French painter Hugues Merle, hosted in his village studio. In an essay in the catalogue, Eva-Maria Höllerer studies the case of women whose works they created in Étretat are still being sought. The third highlight of the course is centered on Matisse. If his stays in 1920 in the small seaside town are known, the paintings he painted there, kept abroad and notably in Baltimore where Etta Cone, one of his great collectors, lived, are rarely presented. This is the opportunity to see several of them.

This chronological exhibition full of twists and turns, which Stéphane Paccoud defines as a “history of landscape art over a period of a century”ends with an epilogue opening the perspective on literature. Not that of The Hollow Needle by Maurice Leblanc, because Arsène Lupine already mentally accompanies most visitors, but that of Guy de Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert. To document its Bouvard and Pécuchetthe second asked the first, in 1877, “a description of the entire coast from Barneval to Étretat” where he planned to place a chapter. The young Maupassant responded to Flaubert with a long illustrated letter, not located today, but of which the National Library of France has a facsimile. Meticulous inventory of a coast cherished by the future author ofA life (1883), it is reproduced enlarged on a wall, facing the monumental prints of the contemporary German photographer Elger Esser.