I had the pleasure today of re-watching one of David Dunlop’s informative episodes of Landscapes Through Time (which I profiled previously here on Lines and Colors).
In this segment, he visited the famous chalk cliffs of Étretat, on the northwestern coast of France, where several generations of painters have been drawn to paint the dramatic geological features and beautiful sea. Dunlop discussed the different approaches taken by Eugene Delacroix, a Romantic painter, Gustave Courbet, a painter of Realism, and Claude Monet, the archetypal Impressionist painter.
I thought it might be interesting to compare some paintings by those artists, as well as two others, Gustave Loiseau, a Post-Impressionist, and Eugéne Boudin.
Boudin was Monet’s first teacher, and introduced Monet to the importance of painting en plein air along the coastline near Étretat and La Havre, where Boudin painted and Monet grew up.
Monet, known for painting the same subject multiple times in differing conditions, painted the cliffs at Éretat numerous times, and from both sides of the headland. Some of his canvases from there are among his best known works.
(Images above: Eugene Delacroix [1,2], Gustave Courbet [3,4,5], Eugene Boudin [6, 7, 8], Gustave Loiseau [9], Claude Monet [10-16])
