Etaples art colony
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The art colony at Étaples
had its heyday between 1880 - 1914, after which it was disrupted by World War I
. Although broadly international, it was made up mainly of English-speakers from North America, Australasia and the British Isles. While some artists settled in the area, other visitors stayed only a season, or an even shorter time, as they journeyed from art colony to art colony along the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. There was no uniformity of style, although there were several shared interests. While most painters left the town in 1914, artistic activity of varied quality was continued during the war by volunteers, artists in uniform and war artists. With peace, some former residents returned to their homes and the persistance of a small colony attracted a few visitors, although little innovative work now resulted.
retreated there from the outbreak of the Paris Commune
in 1871, where he spent his time drawing and executed at least one oil painting of beached boats now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Gallery 3). Norman-born Eugène Boudin
frequently painted along the Opal Coast and spent long periods in both Étaples and at Berck
. Henri Le Sidaner
, who was brought up in Dunkirk, spent the years 1885-1894 in the town and represented the area in all seasons. There he was joined between 1887-93 by his childhood friend Eugène Chigot (1860-1923), who shared his interest in atmospheric light and afterwards went to stay in Paris Plage
.
In 1887 also, Eugène Vail (1857-1934), son of a French mother and American father, moved to Étaples and spent the winter there, lodging with his Irish friend Frank O'Meara
, whose letters home give us information about the colony at that time. Amongst the other artists working there were Boudin and Francis Tattegrain, several more Irish, the English Dudley Hardy
, the Americans Walter Gay
and L. Birge Harrison, and the Australian Eleanor Ritchie, whom Harrison met there and married. While the rest were painting tranquil figures down at the harbour or in the woods, O'Meara describes Vail as ‘painting the deck of a fishing boat in a heavy sea, life-size’. This was "Ready, About!", which won a first-class gold medal in the Paris Salon
of 1888. There Vail plunges the viewer into the picture by extending the diagonally rocking boat into the spectator’s area, while the overall green-gray tonalities evoke the constantly menaced, cold and wet life of the fishermen in Atlantic waters. In the following decade, Vail's Norwegian associate Frits Thaulow
was to spend some time in Étaples while André Derain
stopped there and in Montreuil-sur-mer during the summer of 1909.
The period of Vail's stay was equally profitable for O'Meara's young countryman William Gerard Barry
, who brought back from the harbour his scene of returning prawn fishers, Retour de la Pèche aux Crevettes, which was also accepted at the 1888 Salon. Another success that year was his celebrated "Time Flies", a painting of a peasant woman leaning on a stick and contemplating children in a glade, which was shown at the Royal Academy
. At the same time, Birge Harrison was completing his definitive painting, “The Return of the Mayflower”. Here a cloaked woman looks from the top of dunes towards the ship's silhouette on a shimmering sea. It was to be awarded a medal at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and, for its use of an opalescent tone particularly, is seen as a precursor of American Tonalism
.
The colony that was in the process of being formed in Étaples and neighbouring villages such as Trépied, a mile away on the south bank of the river Canche
, was in reality made up largely of English-speaking expatriates who needed to live cheaply. As Blanche McManus
was to comment two decades later in the record of her travels, 'the colony has been formed by buying up, or renting, the fishermen's cottages at nominal prices and turning them into studios. Such is the popularity of art that the native fisher people importune one to be taken on for models with as much insistence as the beggars of Naples appeal to strangers for money.'
Her account is supplemented by Jane Quigley's description of life there published in 1907. 'The usual plan is to live in rooms or studios and eat at the Hotel des Voyageurs or Hotel Joos - unpretentious hostelries with fairly good meals, served in an atmosphere of friendliness and stimulating talk. In winter the place is deserted, except by a group of serious workers who make it their home. Artists pay about twenty-five or thirty francs a week for board and rooms, and studios are cheap. Étaples has been called - and not without reason - a dirty little town, but it is healthy for all that. The artistic sense finds pleasure in its winding cobbled streets and mellow old houses and in the dark-complexioned southern looking people. Models are plentiful and pose well for a small payment, either in the studio or in the picturesque gardens that lie hidden behind the street doors. A great source of interest is the fishing fleet that comes up the estuary of the Canche to the quays where the fisher people and shrimpers live in a colony of their own. There is constant work for the sketch book, especially on Monday, when the boats go off for several days, the whole family helping the men and boys to start. All one can do amid this bewildering movement of boats putting up sail, and people bustling about with provisions, is to make hurried notes and sketches.'
to the south, through Impressionism
to Post Impressionism. Among some 200 individuals from three continents, subject matter was obviously varied. However, two broad tendencies can be observed in their work. One is the treatment of light, that recommended itself to those of an Impressionist tendency, such as Boudin and Le Sidaner among the French and Wilson Steer from England. In this connection, we have to thank the journalist and amateur painter Édouard Lévêque for putting into words its quality and giving the coastal area it eventual name. Originally from Amiens
, he helped develop Le Touquet as a resort and was editor of its newspaper. The phrase 'Opal Coast' was coined in an article by him in Le journal de Paris-Plage in February 1911. “Is there", he asked, "anything natural that possesses this incessantly changing diversity of colour? Yes, the opal, that precious stone with its milky tones, projecting its series of red and green glints. So let our Côte d'Opale join company with the Côte d'Azur, the Côte d'Emeraude and the Côte d'Argent.”
Gallery 1: Light effects
The other tendency among the artists was to follow the Realism
of such painters as Jules Bastien Lepage and Jean-François Millet
in their choice of humble everyday subjects - in the case of Étaples, the life of the fisherfolk. There are good examples in the work of the American Louis Paul Dessar, who was in the town between 1886-1901, and the Anglo-Australian Tudor St George Tucker
, whose first major painting, "A Picardy Shrimp Fisher", was executed in Étaples. William Gerard Barry's "Time Flies" and Birge Harrison's "The Return of the Mayflower", mentioned above, are works of the same tendency.
One particular focus of attention as a subject was the town's fish market, built in 1872 and now a maritime museum. Examples include “Fish Market, Etaples”, shown in 1913 at the annual exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
by Clara S. Haggarty (1871-1958), and two exhibited at the 1907 Royal Academy
exhibition in England: the Australian James Peter Quinn
's “Fish Market at Étaples”, and “A corner of the market, Etaples” by the animal artist Evelyn Harke (fl.1899-1930). Etchings were also made, two of which are singled out in Whitman’s Print Collector’s Handbook (1918): Nelson Dawson
's aquatint “Halles aux poisons" (1911), made after a visit to the town in 1910 and now in Georgetown University
, and William Lee Hankey
's “Fish Market at Étaples”, now in the British Museum
. The latter depicts baskets of fish on display in a stone hall with two women seated in the left foreground, bending towards one another as they talk, while men walk past them carrying baskets.
The market outside was equally popular, a subject bringing together folk in their distinctive local dress which was particularly adapted to the kind of saleable genre subjects that many of these artists were producing. It is shown in the oil paintings “Market Day” by the English William Holt Yates Titcomb
(see Gallery 2), “Market at Etaples” by the Australian Marie Tuck (1866-1947 and “Market Scene at Etaples” by her compatriot Iso Rae (1860-1940). There was also the charcoal and crayon drawing "Le Marché à Etaples" by Hilda Rix (1884-1961), another Australian, and “Market Place, Étaples”, a watercolour by the Irish artist Mima Nixon (1861-1939) that was displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1909.
Recently there has been some controversy over the authenticity of artistic portrayal of the life of fisherfolk. Nina Lübbren in particular has argued that the strategies employed in producing a work of art present a false picture and are chiefly aimed at satisfying market preconceptions. But while a good deal that was produced is undeniably formulaic, there is evidence also of a social conscience in the paintings of some artists that is manifested in the depiction of their subjects. Walter Gay's "November" might perhaps be dismissed as merely picturesque, a posed portrayal of a peasant woman at the not particularly arduous task of hoeing her cabbage patch (Gallery 4). But George Clausen's depiction of the back-breaking work of “Gathering Potatoes”, painted at nearby Dannes in 1887, reflects concerns that are a constant in his output of the time. It was then too that he began to distance himself from those championing Impressionist effects precisely because drawing attention principally to technique takes it away from any other motivation for choosing the subject portrayed.
Elizabeth Nourse
's "Fisher Girl of Picardy" (Gallery 2) is another case of questionable authenticity. Painted on a blustery day in 1889, it shows a girl with her head slightly turned away and gazing out to sea, while her little brother shelters behind her and wipes the tears from his eyes. Elizabeth Nourse's friend Anna Schmidt later described the circumstances: “I was with Elizabeth when she painted that girl on the Etaples Dunes - it was so cold and windy the model used to weep.” The argument runs that asking a model to pose for a scene that was common enough on that coast and, it must be admitted, in the work of other artists too, falsifies reality. What is not addressed amongst all this scholarly theorising is how else the artist is to bring home the undeniable fact that the existence of those who depend on the sea for a living is hard and anxious and that the weather is one of the hardships to be endured.
The same concern underlies those paintings that show the hazardous nature of the fisherman's work, such as Vail's "Ready, About!" mentioned above, or Max Bohm's "At Sea" (Gallery 3). Academic success, however, now tends to bring the artist's motivation, and so the painting's ultimate aim, into question. Since Eugène Chigot's “Lost at sea” (1891) won a first prize at the Salon when it was exhibited, it might be asked whether the picture is to be viewed as a statement meant to stir the conscience of the urban diner over his fish course or alternatively as artistic exploitation of the subject in order to flatter the viewer into the belief that he has such a conscience.
Gallery 2: Fisher-folk
The painters of two of the colony's nationalities, Americans and Australians, have been the subject of special studies. Among the earliest Americans to visit the town were Walter Gay
, who was making a name for himself with Realist subjects at the time, and Robert Reid
, whose long career as a painter of young women in outside settings began with portraits of peasants in Étaples before his return to the U.S. in 1889. Another early visitor was Homer Dodge Martin
, who was painting on the coast between 1882-6. His work included a topographical view of the harbour in which a wooden hulled ship is being built in the distance and a steam ship is moored on the quays (Gallery 3). The rather more atmospheric "Cottage in the Forest" captures the effect of the parting sun on the dune landscape.
In 1889 the Paris based, salon genre painter, Elizabeth Nourse
, included the town in the tour she made that year. The painting she made there of a "Milk Carrier" is typical of her work. As well as the "Fisher Girl of Picardy" mentioned above, while there she also executed two other paintings now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum
, “An Etaples Fair” and "Street Scene". Later on Eanger Couse
moved to the town and lived there between 1893-6, painting its streets and fisher folk. His “Coastal Scene, Etaples” is particularly worth noting for its interpretation of light. A boat returned from fishing is drawn up on the curving strand opposite cottages as the men unloading it are watched by a little girl; behind them the white, newly risen sun is reflected in the water. Myron Barlow (1873 - 1937) also had a home in Étaples from the late 1890s to his death and specialised particularly in figures in interiors. Among his students there was Norwood Hodge MacGilvary (1874 - 1949), who studied under him in the years 1904-6.
Max Bohm
lived in the area between 1895-1904. Described as a romantic visionary, his heroic depiction of Étaples fishermen, “En Mer” (see Gallery 3), received a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1898. He then moved out of the town to Trépied and while there founded the Société Artistique de Picardie which took over arranging the annual exhibitions of work by local artists started in 1892 by Eugène Chigot. In 1912 the society's president was George Senseney (1874-1943), who was listed as still living in Etaples in a catalogue of works by American etchers the following year.
In 1913, however, Senseney was succeeded as president by the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner
, who had been driven abroad by prejudice and had settled in Trépied. Early in his career, Tanner painted marine scenes that showed man’s struggle with the sea, but by 1895 he was creating mostly religious works. A transitional work from this period is the recently rediscovered painting of a fishing boat tossed on the waves at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
. This is based on the description of a miracle in the Gospel of Matthew
in which 'the boat was now in the middle of the sea, tossed by the waves, for the wind was contrary' (14:24). The simple resources at Étaples were well adapted to his subject matter, which in several cases featured Biblical figures in dark interiors. Occasionally Tanner played host at Trépied to a fellow African-American, William Edouard Scott
, who painted there off and on between 1910-14. Also staying in the village during this decade was Max Bohm’s friend Chauncey Ryder (1868-1949). As soon as he quitted the farmhouse he was renting in 1907, he was succeeded there by the landscape artist Roy Brown (1879-1956), who was to stay until war broke out in 1914.
Other visitors to the area included the landscapist George W. Picknell (1864 - 1943) and the maritime artist John “Wichita Bill” Noble (1874 - 1934), both of whom spent some years in France at that time. Of the other painters of marine subjects associated with the town, Frederick Frary Fursman (1874-1943) spent summers there between 1906-9 while Augustus Koopman (1869 - 1914) kept a studio in Étaples from 1908 and died there in 1914. Yet another visitor was Caleb Arnold Slade (1882-1961), who made annual stays for some seven years until 1915. His “Moonlight at Etaples” looks over the glimmering Canche to the silhouetted buildings of Trépied on the ridge behind and justifies his description as an American Impressionist.
Students were attracted into the area to study with some of these artists. Writing in 1907, Jane Quigley testified of Max Bohm that 'He attracts a following of students by his power as a teacher and the vigorous and sincere personality which exacts good work from all who come under his influence". This was certainly so of the New Zealand artist Samuel Hales (1868-1953), whose painting "La Nuit" was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1897. A later student was the English Jessica Dismorr
, who studied with Bohm in 1904 and went on to adopt a Fauvist and then a Vorticist style.
Gallery 3: Boats
While Bohm taught in Étaples, the Australian artist Rupert Bunny
did most of his teaching in Paris. But between 1893-1907 he was a frequent visitor and has left some memorable paintings, among them the atmospheric "Light on the Canche" and "Low tide at Étaples", both dating from 1902, the same year as "Rainy weather at Étaples" (Gallery 1). Among the students that followed him down was his fellow countrywoman Marie Tuck (1886-1940), who paid for her tuition by cleaning out his studio and came to live in Étaples between 1907-14, and Arthur Baker-Clack (1877 - 1955), another Australian, who settled in Trépied in 1910. While there he painted a local thatched cottage, “Le Chaumine”, and “The boat yard” in Étaples in Neo-Impressionist style (Gallery 3).
Some twenty-five antipodean painters, twenty-two Australians and three New Zealanders, are mentioned in Jean-Claude Lesage’s study. Among them was E. Phillips Fox
, who was connected with several of the French artists' colonies and the plein air style associated with them. Two Australian women are particularly notable: Iso(bel) Rae (1860-1940), who joined the colony in 1890 and exhibited in the Paris Salons, and Emily Hilda Rix (1884-1961), who maintained a studio in Étaples between 1911-14. While there she executed the paintings "An old peasant woman in my garden", later bought by the National Gallery of Victoria, “Picardy Girl” (1913) and the pastel drawing "There is a Dear Old Fairy Godmother who Poses for Us". There were also New Zealand women artists painting together during this time, including Frances Hodgkins
, Grace Joel (1865-1924) and Constance Jenkins (1883-1961).
Another New Zealand visitor was Eric Spencer Macky (1880-1958), who went on to make a career for himself in the United States. Macky had arrived with his Canadian friend A. Y. Jackson
and they took a studio together between May-December 1908. Jackson painted his “Paysage embrumée” then and, rather to his surprise, it was accepted by the Paris Salon. Returning in 1912, he stayed in Trépied and painted with Arthur Baker-Clack. From this period date the Neo-Impressionist “Sand dunes at Cucq” and “Autumn in Picardy”, which was bought by the National Gallery of Canada the following year. He was next to see Étaples in 1916, when taken to the hospital there after being wounded in World War I
. A fellow Canadian painting in the town was the Welsh-born Robert Harris
, who followed the Impressionist fascination with railway architecture and made the railway bridge over the Canche one of his subjects in 1911.
Gallery 4: Exteriors
The only considerable English painter connected with Étaples was Philip Wilson Steer
, who spent some time there in 1887. His misty Impressionist style is striking in such paintings as "The Beach" (Gallery 4) and "Fisher Children". Another work for which he certainly made a preliminary study while there, "The Bridge", is now considered to have been painted in Walberswick
, the English estuary town to which he next moved. Other painters are mainly of topographical interest. Dudley Hardy (1866-1922) captured an evening effect in a watercolour of 1888, looking from the south side of the Canche and showing the windmills that dominated the town at that period. Nora Cundell (1889-1948) takes us into the back parlour of the Cafe Loos, through the doorway of which one can see a few artist types at table.
One English artist who visited the area over many years from 1904 onwards was William Lee Hankey
. Eventually he was to have a house built in Le Touquet and maintain a studio at Étaples. His paintings include land- and seascapes such as "The Harbour", and figure studies like "Mother and Child" and "The Goose Girl". But it was his black and white and coloured etchings of the people of the town, several developed from these paintings, which gained him a reputation as 'one of the most gifted of the figurative printmakers working in original drypoint
during the first thirty years of the 20th century'. Several other makers of fine colour prints also stayed in Étaples, including the marine painter Nelson Dawson
, four of whose prints resulting from his visit in 1910 are in the collection of his work at Georgetown University, and the pioneer of Japanese-style woodblock printing, Frank Morley-Fletcher
, who pictured the road from Trépied in 1910 (Gallery 5).
Among the Scots, three of the four Post-Impressionist painters known as the Scottish Colourists
worked in the area. The two friends John Duncan Fergusson
and Samuel Peploe
regularly painted together at Paris Plage between 1904-09 on visits which also included sessions in Étaples. Leslie Hunter
, the other member of this trio, only began to make a name for himself after the works he produced during his visit to Étaples in 1914 identified him too as a colourist. They included paintings of figures on the beach and a study of "Fishing boats in the harbour". A rather more permanent resident in the area was the slightly older Scot, Thomas Austen Brown (1857-1924), who was living in the nearby village of Camiers to the north and whose work was characteristicly Impressionist. His "Sunshine and Shadow", a view of Étaples through the trees on the south bank of the Canche, is in this style while his "Shrimpers Returning" (Gallery 2) verges on the Neo-Impressionist. Brown was also a notable maker of prints and in 1919 published his Étaples: Pictures, which included 28 tipped-in illustrations, of which ten were in colour.
Gallery 5: Prints
Among those painters known as Irish Impressionists were the peripatetic William Gerard Barry and the short-lived Frank O'Meara, whose early visit to Étaples has already been mentioned. Another of this group was Barry's protégé Harry Scully, who stopped in the town in 1896 but was identified with many other art colonies as well. Sarah Cecilia Harrison
, noted for her paintings of children and landscapes, was there in 1890 and her "On the road to Étaples" was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy
the following year. In 1898 Edith Somerville
was painting in the town, companioned by her friend Violet Martin
. In this case, though, they profited from their stay by conceiving together the stories gathered in Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. (1899). In the following decade Edward Millington Synge (1866-1913) passed some of the winter there and executed “The Thaw, Etaples” (1909), a watercolour of a muddy lane under trees with 'pale yellow sky, purple hills, dull red roof, grey and purple roadway, all obscured by patches of half melted snow’. Also noted for etching, his print of a winter sunset also dates from this stay. The previous year he had married Freda Molony (1869-1924), whose name was mentioned at this period as among those painting in the town and as a successful exhibitor at the Royal Academy. Among her paintings was one of "The Blessing of the Fishing Fleet" at Étaples (1906). Paintings of religious processions were comparatively rare in the colony, but in this case Molony's Impressionist approach, with its photographic cutting off of the action by the frame, can be compared with Iso Rae's Post Impressionist treatment of the "Rogation Sunday" procession some seven years later (Gallery 6).
Gallery 6: Interiors
Another medical volunteer connected with the camp was the Yorkshireman Fred Lawson (1888 – 1968), who painted watercolours of the town and surrounding area. There were also a few who painted among those in uniform. William McDougall Anderson (1883 - 1917) was a Scottish stained glass artist who served as a Lance Corporal and made a few studies while passing through Étaples in October 1916. Serving in the Australian army was Major Edwin Summerhayes. Originally an architect from Perth, Western Australia, he executed several watercolours of war damage in the area (and at the front) in 1917, as well as a vew over the Canche to Paris Plage from the notorious training grounds known as the 'bull ring'.
Two war artists were present during the German air raid on Étaples in May 1918 which also targeted the hospitals. Austin Spare
, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps
, recorded the scene of devastation left by the raid. A dead British soldier lies amidst hundreds of splintered planks of wood that have come from the damaged wooden huts lining the background of the composition. The arm of another dead man emerges from the debris. J. Hodgson Lobley (1878 - 1954), also serving in the RAMC at the time, pictured men constructing an underground dug-out which would serve as a shelter. John Lavery
, one of the official British war artists, had been prevented by illness from leaving the country during the war but visited Étaples in 1919. Moved by the sight of the war cemetery that was served then only by a few women VADs, before it was officially designated by the War Graves Commission, he painted it in its sandy starkness. He also painted the officers’ convalescent home over the bridge in privileged Le Touquet.
Many soldier poets also passed through the camp at Étaples, among them Wilfred Owen
, who commented unfavourably upon it. However, their preoccupation was mainly with the fighting further inland and there are few poems specifically connected with the town. Most of those we know about were from authors later noted for their prose. J.R.R.Tolkien ‘wrote a poem about England’ while passing through on his way to the front in 1915. C.S.Lewis was injured in 1918 and wrote many of the poems in his Spirits in Bondage (1919) while in the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Étaples. A longer term resident was Iso Rae's fellow volunteer, Vera Brittain
, whose Verses of a V.A.D. (1918) was written while working in the military hospital and drew on her experiences there. Muriel Stuart
also devoted a poem to the town in her first collection, which included several references to the war:
A few resident artists from the colony came back after the war, among them Myron Barlow and William Lee Hankey (who had served in the Artists Rifles between 1915-19). Iso Rae now moved to Trépied, where she stayed until 1932. Henry Tanner had been working for the American Red Cross in France during the war and in 1923 was made a knight of the Legion of Honour for his work as an artist - as was Myron Barlow in 1932. By then he too had returned to his house but, as his biographer records, 'life at Trépied was never to be what it had been before the war. An artists’ colony still existed...but something was missing. Many of the old crowd did not return and those who did were less in step with the times.' They were no longer at the cutting edge of artistic developments and the majority had preferred to take back what they had learned and renew traditional approaches in their own countries.
Étaples
Étaples or Étaples-sur-Mer is a commune in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France. It is a fishing and leisure port on the Canche river.There is a separate commune named Staple, Nord.-History:...
had its heyday between 1880 - 1914, after which it was disrupted by World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. Although broadly international, it was made up mainly of English-speakers from North America, Australasia and the British Isles. While some artists settled in the area, other visitors stayed only a season, or an even shorter time, as they journeyed from art colony to art colony along the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. There was no uniformity of style, although there were several shared interests. While most painters left the town in 1914, artistic activity of varied quality was continued during the war by volunteers, artists in uniform and war artists. With peace, some former residents returned to their homes and the persistance of a small colony attracted a few visitors, although little innovative work now resulted.
The first decade
The first French artists to paint in the area were those particularly associated with open air painting. Charles-François DaubignyCharles-François Daubigny
Charles-François Daubigny was one of the painters of the Barbizon school, and is considered an important precursor of Impressionism....
retreated there from the outbreak of the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
in 1871, where he spent his time drawing and executed at least one oil painting of beached boats now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
(Gallery 3). Norman-born Eugène Boudin
Eugène Boudin
Eugène Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors.Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores...
frequently painted along the Opal Coast and spent long periods in both Étaples and at Berck
Berck
Berck, sometimes referred to as Berck-sur-Mer, is a commune in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France and lies within the Marquenterre regional park, an ornithological nature reserve...
. Henri Le Sidaner
Henri Le Sidaner
Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner was an Intimist painter born to a French family in Port Louis, Mauritius. In 1870 he and his family settled in Dunkirk...
, who was brought up in Dunkirk, spent the years 1885-1894 in the town and represented the area in all seasons. There he was joined between 1887-93 by his childhood friend Eugène Chigot (1860-1923), who shared his interest in atmospheric light and afterwards went to stay in Paris Plage
Paris Plage
Paris-Plages is a plan run by the office of the mayor of Paris that creates temporary artificial beaches each summer along the river Seine in the centre of Paris...
.
In 1887 also, Eugène Vail (1857-1934), son of a French mother and American father, moved to Étaples and spent the winter there, lodging with his Irish friend Frank O'Meara
Frank O'Meara
Francis Joseph O'Meara was an Irish artist.-Biography:The son of a doctor, O'Meara was born in Carlow, Ireland. Around 1872, the young artist travelled to Paris where he would study under the French painter Carolus Duran. In 1875 he visited the artists colonies in Barbizon and Grez-sur-Loing....
, whose letters home give us information about the colony at that time. Amongst the other artists working there were Boudin and Francis Tattegrain, several more Irish, the English Dudley Hardy
Dudley Hardy
Dudley Hardy, RI, ROI, RBA, RMS, PS, , was an English painter and illustrator....
, the Americans Walter Gay
Walter Gay
Walter Gay was an American painter born at Hingham, Massachusetts. He married heiress Matilda E. Travers, the daughter of William R. Travers, a prominent New York City investor and co-founder of Saratoga Race Course....
and L. Birge Harrison, and the Australian Eleanor Ritchie, whom Harrison met there and married. While the rest were painting tranquil figures down at the harbour or in the woods, O'Meara describes Vail as ‘painting the deck of a fishing boat in a heavy sea, life-size’. This was "Ready, About!", which won a first-class gold medal in the Paris Salon
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
of 1888. There Vail plunges the viewer into the picture by extending the diagonally rocking boat into the spectator’s area, while the overall green-gray tonalities evoke the constantly menaced, cold and wet life of the fishermen in Atlantic waters. In the following decade, Vail's Norwegian associate Frits Thaulow
Frits Thaulow
Frits Thaulow was a Norwegian impressionist painter, best known for his naturalistic depictions of landscape.-Biography:...
was to spend some time in Étaples while André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...
stopped there and in Montreuil-sur-mer during the summer of 1909.
The period of Vail's stay was equally profitable for O'Meara's young countryman William Gerard Barry
William Gerard Barry
William Gerard Barry was an Irish painter.-Career:The son of a magistrate, Barry was born in Ballyadam, Carrigtwohill, County Cork. He enrolled in Cork's Crawford School of Art and studied there under Henry Jones Thaddeus from 1881 to 1883...
, who brought back from the harbour his scene of returning prawn fishers, Retour de la Pèche aux Crevettes, which was also accepted at the 1888 Salon. Another success that year was his celebrated "Time Flies", a painting of a peasant woman leaning on a stick and contemplating children in a glade, which was shown at the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
. At the same time, Birge Harrison was completing his definitive painting, “The Return of the Mayflower”. Here a cloaked woman looks from the top of dunes towards the ship's silhouette on a shimmering sea. It was to be awarded a medal at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and, for its use of an opalescent tone particularly, is seen as a precursor of American Tonalism
Tonalism
Tonalism was an artistic style that emerged in the 1880s when American artists began to paint landscape forms with an overall tone of colored atmosphere or mist. Between 1880 and 1915, dark, neutral hues such as gray, brown or blue, often dominated compositions by artists associated with the style...
.
The colony that was in the process of being formed in Étaples and neighbouring villages such as Trépied, a mile away on the south bank of the river Canche
Canche
The river Canche is one of the rivers that flow from the plateau of the southern Boulonnais and Picardy, into the English Channel. The Somme is the largest example. The basin of the Canche extends to 1,274 square kilometres and lies in the southern end of the département of Pas-de-Calais...
, was in reality made up largely of English-speaking expatriates who needed to live cheaply. As Blanche McManus
Blanche McManus
Blanche McManus was an American writer and artist. She and her husband, Milburg Francisco Mansfield, wrote a series of illustrated travel books, many of which contained automobiles which were new at the time. She was born in...
was to comment two decades later in the record of her travels, 'the colony has been formed by buying up, or renting, the fishermen's cottages at nominal prices and turning them into studios. Such is the popularity of art that the native fisher people importune one to be taken on for models with as much insistence as the beggars of Naples appeal to strangers for money.'
Her account is supplemented by Jane Quigley's description of life there published in 1907. 'The usual plan is to live in rooms or studios and eat at the Hotel des Voyageurs or Hotel Joos - unpretentious hostelries with fairly good meals, served in an atmosphere of friendliness and stimulating talk. In winter the place is deserted, except by a group of serious workers who make it their home. Artists pay about twenty-five or thirty francs a week for board and rooms, and studios are cheap. Étaples has been called - and not without reason - a dirty little town, but it is healthy for all that. The artistic sense finds pleasure in its winding cobbled streets and mellow old houses and in the dark-complexioned southern looking people. Models are plentiful and pose well for a small payment, either in the studio or in the picturesque gardens that lie hidden behind the street doors. A great source of interest is the fishing fleet that comes up the estuary of the Canche to the quays where the fisher people and shrimpers live in a colony of their own. There is constant work for the sketch book, especially on Monday, when the boats go off for several days, the whole family helping the men and boys to start. All one can do amid this bewildering movement of boats putting up sail, and people bustling about with provisions, is to make hurried notes and sketches.'
Styles and subjects
Recently there have been references to l'École d'Étaples in the wake of an exhibition of those who were painting locally between 1880-1914. But while many of them painted out of doors, as was the new fashion in those years, their styles were too diverse to constitute a school. They ranged from the plein-air style of artists' coloniesArt colony
right|300px|thumb|Artist houses in [[Montsalvat]] near [[Melbourne, Australia]].An art colony or artists' colony is a place where creative practitioners live and interact with one another. Artists are often invited or selected through a formal process, for a residency from a few weeks to over a year...
to the south, through Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
to Post Impressionism. Among some 200 individuals from three continents, subject matter was obviously varied. However, two broad tendencies can be observed in their work. One is the treatment of light, that recommended itself to those of an Impressionist tendency, such as Boudin and Le Sidaner among the French and Wilson Steer from England. In this connection, we have to thank the journalist and amateur painter Édouard Lévêque for putting into words its quality and giving the coastal area it eventual name. Originally from Amiens
Amiens
Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...
, he helped develop Le Touquet as a resort and was editor of its newspaper. The phrase 'Opal Coast' was coined in an article by him in Le journal de Paris-Plage in February 1911. “Is there", he asked, "anything natural that possesses this incessantly changing diversity of colour? Yes, the opal, that precious stone with its milky tones, projecting its series of red and green glints. So let our Côte d'Opale join company with the Côte d'Azur, the Côte d'Emeraude and the Côte d'Argent.”
Gallery 1: Light effects
The other tendency among the artists was to follow the Realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
of such painters as Jules Bastien Lepage and Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France...
in their choice of humble everyday subjects - in the case of Étaples, the life of the fisherfolk. There are good examples in the work of the American Louis Paul Dessar, who was in the town between 1886-1901, and the Anglo-Australian Tudor St George Tucker
Tudor St George Tucker
Tudor St George Tucker was born in Finchley in Middlesex the son of Captain Charlton Nassau Tucker, a retired cavalry officer in the East India Company's service. He came to Melbourne in 1881 in search of a healthier climate...
, whose first major painting, "A Picardy Shrimp Fisher", was executed in Étaples. William Gerard Barry's "Time Flies" and Birge Harrison's "The Return of the Mayflower", mentioned above, are works of the same tendency.
One particular focus of attention as a subject was the town's fish market, built in 1872 and now a maritime museum. Examples include “Fish Market, Etaples”, shown in 1913 at the annual exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts is a Canadian arts-related institution founded in 1880, under the patronage of the Governor General of Canada, Sir John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, the Marquess of Lorne. Canadian landscape painter Homer Watson was a member and president of the Academy...
by Clara S. Haggarty (1871-1958), and two exhibited at the 1907 Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
exhibition in England: the Australian James Peter Quinn
James Peter Quinn
James Peter Quinn was an Australian portrait painter born in MelbourneHe studied part-time under Frederick McCubbin 1887–1999 then at the Melbourne National Gallery School under George Folingsby and Bernard Hall 1889–1893, then in Paris at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from...
's “Fish Market at Étaples”, and “A corner of the market, Etaples” by the animal artist Evelyn Harke (fl.1899-1930). Etchings were also made, two of which are singled out in Whitman’s Print Collector’s Handbook (1918): Nelson Dawson
Nelson Dawson
Nelson Ethelred Dawson was an English artist and member of the Arts and Crafts movement.Dawson was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire and educated at Stamford School. He moved to London, where he operated his workshop first from Chelsea and in due course from the rear of his townhouse in Chiswick...
's aquatint “Halles aux poisons" (1911), made after a visit to the town in 1910 and now in Georgetown University
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
, and William Lee Hankey
William Lee Hankey
William Lee Hankey RWS,RI,ROI,RE,NS was a British painter and book illustrator. He specialised in landscapes, character studies and portraits of pastoral life, particularly in studies of mothers with young children such as "We’ve...
's “Fish Market at Étaples”, now in the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
. The latter depicts baskets of fish on display in a stone hall with two women seated in the left foreground, bending towards one another as they talk, while men walk past them carrying baskets.
The market outside was equally popular, a subject bringing together folk in their distinctive local dress which was particularly adapted to the kind of saleable genre subjects that many of these artists were producing. It is shown in the oil paintings “Market Day” by the English William Holt Yates Titcomb
William Holt Yates Titcomb
William Holt Yates Titcomb was an English artist.Titcomb was born in Cambridge, the eighth child and first son of the Rev. Jonathan Holt Titcomb and his wife Sarah....
(see Gallery 2), “Market at Etaples” by the Australian Marie Tuck (1866-1947 and “Market Scene at Etaples” by her compatriot Iso Rae (1860-1940). There was also the charcoal and crayon drawing "Le Marché à Etaples" by Hilda Rix (1884-1961), another Australian, and “Market Place, Étaples”, a watercolour by the Irish artist Mima Nixon (1861-1939) that was displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1909.
Recently there has been some controversy over the authenticity of artistic portrayal of the life of fisherfolk. Nina Lübbren in particular has argued that the strategies employed in producing a work of art present a false picture and are chiefly aimed at satisfying market preconceptions. But while a good deal that was produced is undeniably formulaic, there is evidence also of a social conscience in the paintings of some artists that is manifested in the depiction of their subjects. Walter Gay's "November" might perhaps be dismissed as merely picturesque, a posed portrayal of a peasant woman at the not particularly arduous task of hoeing her cabbage patch (Gallery 4). But George Clausen's depiction of the back-breaking work of “Gathering Potatoes”, painted at nearby Dannes in 1887, reflects concerns that are a constant in his output of the time. It was then too that he began to distance himself from those championing Impressionist effects precisely because drawing attention principally to technique takes it away from any other motivation for choosing the subject portrayed.
Elizabeth Nourse
Elizabeth Nourse
Elizabeth Nourse was a portrait and landscape painter born in Cincinnati, Ohio in the Mt. Healthy area...
's "Fisher Girl of Picardy" (Gallery 2) is another case of questionable authenticity. Painted on a blustery day in 1889, it shows a girl with her head slightly turned away and gazing out to sea, while her little brother shelters behind her and wipes the tears from his eyes. Elizabeth Nourse's friend Anna Schmidt later described the circumstances: “I was with Elizabeth when she painted that girl on the Etaples Dunes - it was so cold and windy the model used to weep.” The argument runs that asking a model to pose for a scene that was common enough on that coast and, it must be admitted, in the work of other artists too, falsifies reality. What is not addressed amongst all this scholarly theorising is how else the artist is to bring home the undeniable fact that the existence of those who depend on the sea for a living is hard and anxious and that the weather is one of the hardships to be endured.
The same concern underlies those paintings that show the hazardous nature of the fisherman's work, such as Vail's "Ready, About!" mentioned above, or Max Bohm's "At Sea" (Gallery 3). Academic success, however, now tends to bring the artist's motivation, and so the painting's ultimate aim, into question. Since Eugène Chigot's “Lost at sea” (1891) won a first prize at the Salon when it was exhibited, it might be asked whether the picture is to be viewed as a statement meant to stir the conscience of the urban diner over his fish course or alternatively as artistic exploitation of the subject in order to flatter the viewer into the belief that he has such a conscience.
Gallery 2: Fisher-folk
Nationalities
- a) Americans
The painters of two of the colony's nationalities, Americans and Australians, have been the subject of special studies. Among the earliest Americans to visit the town were Walter Gay
Walter Gay
Walter Gay was an American painter born at Hingham, Massachusetts. He married heiress Matilda E. Travers, the daughter of William R. Travers, a prominent New York City investor and co-founder of Saratoga Race Course....
, who was making a name for himself with Realist subjects at the time, and Robert Reid
Robert Reid (painter)
Robert Lewis Reid was an American Impressionist painter and muralist.-Life and work:Robert Reid was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Otto Grundmann, where he was also later an instructor...
, whose long career as a painter of young women in outside settings began with portraits of peasants in Étaples before his return to the U.S. in 1889. Another early visitor was Homer Dodge Martin
Homer Dodge Martin
Homer Dodge Martin was an American artist, particularly known for his landscapes.-Biography:Martin was born at Albany, New York. A pupil for a short time of William Hart, his earlier work was closely aligned with the Hudson River School...
, who was painting on the coast between 1882-6. His work included a topographical view of the harbour in which a wooden hulled ship is being built in the distance and a steam ship is moored on the quays (Gallery 3). The rather more atmospheric "Cottage in the Forest" captures the effect of the parting sun on the dune landscape.
In 1889 the Paris based, salon genre painter, Elizabeth Nourse
Elizabeth Nourse
Elizabeth Nourse was a portrait and landscape painter born in Cincinnati, Ohio in the Mt. Healthy area...
, included the town in the tour she made that year. The painting she made there of a "Milk Carrier" is typical of her work. As well as the "Fisher Girl of Picardy" mentioned above, while there she also executed two other paintings now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...
, “An Etaples Fair” and "Street Scene". Later on Eanger Couse
E. Irving Couse
Eanger Irving Couse was an American artist and a founding member and first president of the Taos Society of Artists. He is noted for paintings of Native Americans, New Mexico, and the American Southwest...
moved to the town and lived there between 1893-6, painting its streets and fisher folk. His “Coastal Scene, Etaples” is particularly worth noting for its interpretation of light. A boat returned from fishing is drawn up on the curving strand opposite cottages as the men unloading it are watched by a little girl; behind them the white, newly risen sun is reflected in the water. Myron Barlow (1873 - 1937) also had a home in Étaples from the late 1890s to his death and specialised particularly in figures in interiors. Among his students there was Norwood Hodge MacGilvary (1874 - 1949), who studied under him in the years 1904-6.
Max Bohm
Max Bohm
Max Bohm was an American artist born in Cleveland but he spent much of his time in Europe.-Biography:Bohm was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Bohm studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and travelled in Europe. He taught painting at a school in London until 1911 before returning to join the school of...
lived in the area between 1895-1904. Described as a romantic visionary, his heroic depiction of Étaples fishermen, “En Mer” (see Gallery 3), received a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1898. He then moved out of the town to Trépied and while there founded the Société Artistique de Picardie which took over arranging the annual exhibitions of work by local artists started in 1892 by Eugène Chigot. In 1912 the society's president was George Senseney (1874-1943), who was listed as still living in Etaples in a catalogue of works by American etchers the following year.
In 1913, however, Senseney was succeeded as president by the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American artist best known for his style of painting. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim.-Education:...
, who had been driven abroad by prejudice and had settled in Trépied. Early in his career, Tanner painted marine scenes that showed man’s struggle with the sea, but by 1895 he was creating mostly religious works. A transitional work from this period is the recently rediscovered painting of a fishing boat tossed on the waves at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...
. This is based on the description of a miracle in the Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
in which 'the boat was now in the middle of the sea, tossed by the waves, for the wind was contrary' (14:24). The simple resources at Étaples were well adapted to his subject matter, which in several cases featured Biblical figures in dark interiors. Occasionally Tanner played host at Trépied to a fellow African-American, William Edouard Scott
William Edouard Scott
William Edouard Scott was an African American artist. Even before Alain Locke asked African Americans to create and portray the New Negro that would thrust them into the future, artists like William Edouard Scott were depicting blacks in new ways to break away from the subjugating images of the past...
, who painted there off and on between 1910-14. Also staying in the village during this decade was Max Bohm’s friend Chauncey Ryder (1868-1949). As soon as he quitted the farmhouse he was renting in 1907, he was succeeded there by the landscape artist Roy Brown (1879-1956), who was to stay until war broke out in 1914.
Other visitors to the area included the landscapist George W. Picknell (1864 - 1943) and the maritime artist John “Wichita Bill” Noble (1874 - 1934), both of whom spent some years in France at that time. Of the other painters of marine subjects associated with the town, Frederick Frary Fursman (1874-1943) spent summers there between 1906-9 while Augustus Koopman (1869 - 1914) kept a studio in Étaples from 1908 and died there in 1914. Yet another visitor was Caleb Arnold Slade (1882-1961), who made annual stays for some seven years until 1915. His “Moonlight at Etaples” looks over the glimmering Canche to the silhouetted buildings of Trépied on the ridge behind and justifies his description as an American Impressionist.
Students were attracted into the area to study with some of these artists. Writing in 1907, Jane Quigley testified of Max Bohm that 'He attracts a following of students by his power as a teacher and the vigorous and sincere personality which exacts good work from all who come under his influence". This was certainly so of the New Zealand artist Samuel Hales (1868-1953), whose painting "La Nuit" was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1897. A later student was the English Jessica Dismorr
Jessica Dismorr
Jessica Dismorr was an English painter and illustrator and one of only two women members of the Vorticist movement.-Early life:Dismorr was born at Gravesend, England, and moved with her family to Hampstead in the 1890s...
, who studied with Bohm in 1904 and went on to adopt a Fauvist and then a Vorticist style.
Gallery 3: Boats
- b) British colonials
While Bohm taught in Étaples, the Australian artist Rupert Bunny
Rupert Bunny
Rupert Charles Wulsten Bunny was an Australian painter, born in St Kilda, Victoria. He achieved success and critical acclaim as an expatriate in fin-de-siècle Paris....
did most of his teaching in Paris. But between 1893-1907 he was a frequent visitor and has left some memorable paintings, among them the atmospheric "Light on the Canche" and "Low tide at Étaples", both dating from 1902, the same year as "Rainy weather at Étaples" (Gallery 1). Among the students that followed him down was his fellow countrywoman Marie Tuck (1886-1940), who paid for her tuition by cleaning out his studio and came to live in Étaples between 1907-14, and Arthur Baker-Clack (1877 - 1955), another Australian, who settled in Trépied in 1910. While there he painted a local thatched cottage, “Le Chaumine”, and “The boat yard” in Étaples in Neo-Impressionist style (Gallery 3).
Some twenty-five antipodean painters, twenty-two Australians and three New Zealanders, are mentioned in Jean-Claude Lesage’s study. Among them was E. Phillips Fox
E. Phillips Fox
- Education :Fox was born on 12 March 1865 to Alexander Fox and Rosetta Phillips at 12 Victoria Parade in Fitzroy, Melbourne, into a legal family whose firm, DLA Phillips Fox, still exists. He studied art at the National Gallery School in Melbourne from 1878 until 1886 under G. F...
, who was connected with several of the French artists' colonies and the plein air style associated with them. Two Australian women are particularly notable: Iso(bel) Rae (1860-1940), who joined the colony in 1890 and exhibited in the Paris Salons, and Emily Hilda Rix (1884-1961), who maintained a studio in Étaples between 1911-14. While there she executed the paintings "An old peasant woman in my garden", later bought by the National Gallery of Victoria, “Picardy Girl” (1913) and the pastel drawing "There is a Dear Old Fairy Godmother who Poses for Us". There were also New Zealand women artists painting together during this time, including Frances Hodgkins
Frances Hodgkins
Frances Mary Hodgkins was a painter chiefly of landscape and still life, and for a short period was a designer of textiles. She was born in New Zealand, but spent most of her working life in Britain...
, Grace Joel (1865-1924) and Constance Jenkins (1883-1961).
Another New Zealand visitor was Eric Spencer Macky (1880-1958), who went on to make a career for himself in the United States. Macky had arrived with his Canadian friend A. Y. Jackson
A. Y. Jackson
Alexander Young Jackson, was a Canadian painter and a founding member of the Group of Seven.- Early life and training :...
and they took a studio together between May-December 1908. Jackson painted his “Paysage embrumée” then and, rather to his surprise, it was accepted by the Paris Salon. Returning in 1912, he stayed in Trépied and painted with Arthur Baker-Clack. From this period date the Neo-Impressionist “Sand dunes at Cucq” and “Autumn in Picardy”, which was bought by the National Gallery of Canada the following year. He was next to see Étaples in 1916, when taken to the hospital there after being wounded in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. A fellow Canadian painting in the town was the Welsh-born Robert Harris
Robert Harris (painter)
Robert Harris was a Welsh-born Canadian painter most noted for his portrait of the Fathers of Confederation....
, who followed the Impressionist fascination with railway architecture and made the railway bridge over the Canche one of his subjects in 1911.
Gallery 4: Exteriors
- c) British and Irish
The only considerable English painter connected with Étaples was Philip Wilson Steer
Philip Wilson Steer
Philip Wilson Steer OM was a British painter of landscape and occasional portraits and figure studies. He was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain.-Life and work:...
, who spent some time there in 1887. His misty Impressionist style is striking in such paintings as "The Beach" (Gallery 4) and "Fisher Children". Another work for which he certainly made a preliminary study while there, "The Bridge", is now considered to have been painted in Walberswick
Walberswick
Walberswick is a village on the Suffolk coast in England, across the River Blyth from Southwold. Coastal erosion and the shifting of the mouth of the River Blyth meant that the neighbouring town of Dunwich was lost as a port in the last years of the 13th century...
, the English estuary town to which he next moved. Other painters are mainly of topographical interest. Dudley Hardy (1866-1922) captured an evening effect in a watercolour of 1888, looking from the south side of the Canche and showing the windmills that dominated the town at that period. Nora Cundell (1889-1948) takes us into the back parlour of the Cafe Loos, through the doorway of which one can see a few artist types at table.
One English artist who visited the area over many years from 1904 onwards was William Lee Hankey
William Lee Hankey
William Lee Hankey RWS,RI,ROI,RE,NS was a British painter and book illustrator. He specialised in landscapes, character studies and portraits of pastoral life, particularly in studies of mothers with young children such as "We’ve...
. Eventually he was to have a house built in Le Touquet and maintain a studio at Étaples. His paintings include land- and seascapes such as "The Harbour", and figure studies like "Mother and Child" and "The Goose Girl". But it was his black and white and coloured etchings of the people of the town, several developed from these paintings, which gained him a reputation as 'one of the most gifted of the figurative printmakers working in original drypoint
Drypoint
Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. Traditionally the plate was copper, but now acetate, zinc, or plexiglas are also commonly used...
during the first thirty years of the 20th century'. Several other makers of fine colour prints also stayed in Étaples, including the marine painter Nelson Dawson
Nelson Dawson
Nelson Ethelred Dawson was an English artist and member of the Arts and Crafts movement.Dawson was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire and educated at Stamford School. He moved to London, where he operated his workshop first from Chelsea and in due course from the rear of his townhouse in Chiswick...
, four of whose prints resulting from his visit in 1910 are in the collection of his work at Georgetown University, and the pioneer of Japanese-style woodblock printing, Frank Morley-Fletcher
Frank Morley-Fletcher
Frank Morley Fletcher was a British painter and printmaker known primarily for his role in introducing Japanese colored woodcut printing as an important genre in Western art....
, who pictured the road from Trépied in 1910 (Gallery 5).
Among the Scots, three of the four Post-Impressionist painters known as the Scottish Colourists
Scottish Colourists
The Scottish Colourists were a group of painters from Scotland whose work was not very highly regarded when it was first exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, but which in the late 20th Century came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art....
worked in the area. The two friends John Duncan Fergusson
John Duncan Fergusson
John Duncan Fergusson was a Scottish artist, regarded as one of the major artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting.- Early life :...
and Samuel Peploe
Samuel Peploe
Samuel John Peploe was a Scottish Post-Impressionist painter, noted for his still life works and for being one of the group of four painters that became known as the Scottish Colourists...
regularly painted together at Paris Plage between 1904-09 on visits which also included sessions in Étaples. Leslie Hunter
Leslie Hunter
George Leslie Hunter , commonly just called Leslie Hunter, was a self-taught Scottish painter and one of the artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting. He spent much of his early life in California, USA, but returned later to Scotland and traveled widely in Europe, especially in the...
, the other member of this trio, only began to make a name for himself after the works he produced during his visit to Étaples in 1914 identified him too as a colourist. They included paintings of figures on the beach and a study of "Fishing boats in the harbour". A rather more permanent resident in the area was the slightly older Scot, Thomas Austen Brown (1857-1924), who was living in the nearby village of Camiers to the north and whose work was characteristicly Impressionist. His "Sunshine and Shadow", a view of Étaples through the trees on the south bank of the Canche, is in this style while his "Shrimpers Returning" (Gallery 2) verges on the Neo-Impressionist. Brown was also a notable maker of prints and in 1919 published his Étaples: Pictures, which included 28 tipped-in illustrations, of which ten were in colour.
Gallery 5: Prints
Among those painters known as Irish Impressionists were the peripatetic William Gerard Barry and the short-lived Frank O'Meara, whose early visit to Étaples has already been mentioned. Another of this group was Barry's protégé Harry Scully, who stopped in the town in 1896 but was identified with many other art colonies as well. Sarah Cecilia Harrison
Sarah Cecilia Harrison
Sarah Cecilia Harrison was an Irish artist and the first woman to serve on Dublin City Council.Harrison, who went by the name Cecilia, was born to an affluent family in Holywood, County Down. She was the great grand-niece of Henry Joy McCracken. When she was 10 her father died and the family...
, noted for her paintings of children and landscapes, was there in 1890 and her "On the road to Étaples" was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy
Royal Hibernian Academy
The Royal Hibernian Academy is an artist-based and artist-oriented institution in Ireland, founded in Dublin in 1823.-History:The RHA was founded as the result of 30 Irish artists petitioning the government for a charter of incorporation...
the following year. In 1898 Edith Somerville
Edith Anna Somerville
Edith Anna Œnone Somerville was an Irish novelist who habitually signed herself as "E. Œ. Somerville". She wrote in collaboration with her cousin "Martin Ross" under the pseudonym "Somerville and Ross"...
was painting in the town, companioned by her friend Violet Martin
Violet Florence Martin
Violet Florence Martin was an Irish author who co-wrote a series of novels with cousin Edith Somerville under the pen name of Martin Ross in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.- Early life :...
. In this case, though, they profited from their stay by conceiving together the stories gathered in Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. (1899). In the following decade Edward Millington Synge (1866-1913) passed some of the winter there and executed “The Thaw, Etaples” (1909), a watercolour of a muddy lane under trees with 'pale yellow sky, purple hills, dull red roof, grey and purple roadway, all obscured by patches of half melted snow’. Also noted for etching, his print of a winter sunset also dates from this stay. The previous year he had married Freda Molony (1869-1924), whose name was mentioned at this period as among those painting in the town and as a successful exhibitor at the Royal Academy. Among her paintings was one of "The Blessing of the Fishing Fleet" at Étaples (1906). Paintings of religious processions were comparatively rare in the colony, but in this case Molony's Impressionist approach, with its photographic cutting off of the action by the frame, can be compared with Iso Rae's Post Impressionist treatment of the "Rogation Sunday" procession some seven years later (Gallery 6).
Gallery 6: Interiors
The aftermath
With the outbreak of war, the artists in the colony scattered elsewhere and the English army eventually turned the dune area at the back of the town into a vast transit camp, which in turn brought air attacks and some devastation to the town. Several hospitals were set up for those wounded in the nearby fighting and, sadly, what was to become a huge military cemetery. Some American artists hung on for a while. Writing in the New York Times in February 1915, the newly returned Arnold Slade gave an account of the military build-up in the area. He also mentioned how American artists in the town had volunteered for 12-hour shifts feeding troops as they passed through the station. But almost the only artist to stay on in Étaples throughout the war and record the military activity there was Iso Rae. While working for the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the British Red Cross between 1915-1919, she produced about 200 pastel drawings of the army camp and the life of the soldiers there. Made in the limited time she had spare from her duties, they are of great documentary interest but differ in style from her regular work.Another medical volunteer connected with the camp was the Yorkshireman Fred Lawson (1888 – 1968), who painted watercolours of the town and surrounding area. There were also a few who painted among those in uniform. William McDougall Anderson (1883 - 1917) was a Scottish stained glass artist who served as a Lance Corporal and made a few studies while passing through Étaples in October 1916. Serving in the Australian army was Major Edwin Summerhayes. Originally an architect from Perth, Western Australia, he executed several watercolours of war damage in the area (and at the front) in 1917, as well as a vew over the Canche to Paris Plage from the notorious training grounds known as the 'bull ring'.
Two war artists were present during the German air raid on Étaples in May 1918 which also targeted the hospitals. Austin Spare
Austin Osman Spare
Austin Osman Spare was an English artist who developed idiosyncratic magical techniques including automatic writing, automatic drawing and sigilization based on his theories of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self...
, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps
Royal Army Medical Corps
The Royal Army Medical Corps is a specialist corps in the British Army which provides medical services to all British Army personnel and their families in war and in peace...
, recorded the scene of devastation left by the raid. A dead British soldier lies amidst hundreds of splintered planks of wood that have come from the damaged wooden huts lining the background of the composition. The arm of another dead man emerges from the debris. J. Hodgson Lobley (1878 - 1954), also serving in the RAMC at the time, pictured men constructing an underground dug-out which would serve as a shelter. John Lavery
John Lavery
Sir John Lavery was an Irish painter best known for his portraits.Belfast-born John Lavery attended the Haldane Academy, in Glasgow, in the 1870s and the Académie Julian in Paris in the early 1880s. He returned to Glasgow and was associated with the Glasgow School...
, one of the official British war artists, had been prevented by illness from leaving the country during the war but visited Étaples in 1919. Moved by the sight of the war cemetery that was served then only by a few women VADs, before it was officially designated by the War Graves Commission, he painted it in its sandy starkness. He also painted the officers’ convalescent home over the bridge in privileged Le Touquet.
Many soldier poets also passed through the camp at Étaples, among them Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War...
, who commented unfavourably upon it. However, their preoccupation was mainly with the fighting further inland and there are few poems specifically connected with the town. Most of those we know about were from authors later noted for their prose. J.R.R.Tolkien ‘wrote a poem about England’ while passing through on his way to the front in 1915. C.S.Lewis was injured in 1918 and wrote many of the poems in his Spirits in Bondage (1919) while in the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Étaples. A longer term resident was Iso Rae's fellow volunteer, Vera Brittain
Vera Brittain
Vera Mary Brittain was a British writer, feminist and pacifist, best remembered as the author of the best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, recounting her experiences during World War I and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.-Life:Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Brittain was the...
, whose Verses of a V.A.D. (1918) was written while working in the military hospital and drew on her experiences there. Muriel Stuart
Muriel Stuart
Muriel Stuart The daughter of a Scottish barrister, was a poet, particularly concerned with the topic of sexual politics, though she first wrote poems about World War I. She later gave up poetry writing; her last work was published in the 1930s...
also devoted a poem to the town in her first collection, which included several references to the war:
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- 'Étaples', a strange, vague word
- Spelled on the lips of the guns
- Where all that our wild hearts loved
- Went through with the regiment once!
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A few resident artists from the colony came back after the war, among them Myron Barlow and William Lee Hankey (who had served in the Artists Rifles between 1915-19). Iso Rae now moved to Trépied, where she stayed until 1932. Henry Tanner had been working for the American Red Cross in France during the war and in 1923 was made a knight of the Legion of Honour for his work as an artist - as was Myron Barlow in 1932. By then he too had returned to his house but, as his biographer records, 'life at Trépied was never to be what it had been before the war. An artists’ colony still existed...but something was missing. Many of the old crowd did not return and those who did were less in step with the times.' They were no longer at the cutting edge of artistic developments and the majority had preferred to take back what they had learned and renew traditional approaches in their own countries.