Good afternoon, and welcome to this series of gallery talks at home.
My name is Sarah Herring and I'm Associate Curator in Post
1800 paintings. Now that it is well and truly summer,
I thought it would be lovely to escape to the beach.
For some this has been a possibility but for many,
for a wide variety of reasons, there has been no opportunity to see the sea for a
long time. So today, I'm going to bring it to you
from my living room. One of the beaches we're going to look at is British.
The other scenes were painted in France, the Netherlands,
and the last not on the beach at all, but in a studio.
All my examples are from the 19th century, beginning with speedily painted
and largely uninhabited views, through the scenes painted towards the
end of the 19th century reflecting the explosion of tourism
and seaside holidays. My earliest two pictures are by two British artists,
John Constable's 'Weymouth Bay: Bowleaze Cove and Jordan Hill'
painted in 1816-17, and Richard Parkes Bonington's 'An Estuary in
Northern France, Possibly that of the River Somme' painted
in around 1825-7. Bonington was British, but he spent most
of his short life in France, and he was an important linking figure
between French and British landscape practice in the
early 19th century. Constable too was hugely important for the
development of landscape painting in France.
The Bonington was painted pretty much entirely in the open air.
It is very rapidly painted with sweeping horizontal brushstrokes defining
stretches of sand, sea, and sky. A fishing boat rests at the
right, and a solitary figure of a woman sits on
the dunes. I think that Bonington has captured
perfectly the pearly luminosity of the coast,
the silvery sand, the rippling rays of the estuary,
and something which always delights the museum curator.
We have found a fragment of shell blown by the wind,
embedded in the paint surface. The Constable is a winter scene
painted during the artist's honeymoon in Dorset, following his marriage to Maria
Elizabeth Bicknell. He painted three pictures of this bay,
this one probably in the open air, or perhaps
from the nearby vicarage where they were staying.
Like the Bonington, it is broadly and boldly painted with brownish
priming showing through everywhere, particularly in the foreground, where it
forms the colour of the sand. In places, it is painted very thinly, as
in the sea, where strokes of grey and white are laid
over the priming. Despite the forbidding clouds, it is a
bright scene. Constable has used much white to portray
light emanating from behind the clouds,
particularly at the left, close to the horizon.
Both the Bonington and the Constable are largely empty. There's a lone figure
in the Bonington, and in the Constable there's a shepherd
and a flock of sheep at the right. They are primarily studies of nature, of
sea and sky, and they were painted before going to
the beach as recreation became truly popular.
In the 18th century, the notion of sea and sea air being beneficial to health
emerged, and then later in the 19th, leisure trips
to the seaside became common, leading to the expansion of seaside
resorts. Some would stay for weeks at a time. Even
so, for many workers, the seaside meant an
annual day trip by bus or train, so my next two pictures are a
reflection of this new popular trend. Eugene Boudin's 'Beach Scene,
Trouville', painted in 1873, and Claude Monet's
'The Beach at Trouville' painted in 1870. Both are set in Trouville, a fashionable
resort on the Normandy coast in the 1860s. Boudin began to paint the
well-to-do holiday makers who flocked there from
Paris, and this picture of a frieze of figures
strung out along the sand is typical of his work from the 1870s
onwards. His pictures became more freely painted,
and this one is no exception. In this detail you can see that he has
not even sketched in the faces, as in the man standing at the back,
and the seated woman holding her parasol. This is the era before the invention of
the folding deck chair, which became popular later in the 19th century.
The holiday makers stand, or they sit on the sand,
or on these hard wooden chairs, which are essentially upright domestic chairs.
A couple have blown over in the wind. This is a common
feature of Boudin's work, he often depicted these literally strewn around
in front of the sitters. The two women in the Monet are also
sitting on these chairs, and there's an empty one in the middle
on which is hung a child's beach shoe, perhaps that of
Jean, the son of Monet and his first wife Camille,
who was the figure on the left. They spent the summer months of 1870 in
Trouville. Boudin and his wife were also staying in
Trouville at this time, and it has been proposed that the figure
on the right is in fact Madame Boudin. Boudin and Monet met in the 1850s and
Boudin encouraged Monet to paint out of doors
which is what he's doing here. This painting is even more broadly
painted than the Boudin. The figures are placed right up close to the picture
plane, so the bold strokes defining the
clothing, the broad white strokes on Camille's dress,
appear even more startling, and despite the sky being full of clouds, there is a
strong sense of sunlight reflected in these bright highlights, her
dress, and the touches of white on the rungs of
the chair. I pointed out the shell in the
Bonington. Here, it is sand blown onto the surface,
visible even to the naked eye, as in this detail from the white brushstrokes on
Camille's dress, and the sand visible behind the rungs of the chair.
Boudin reluctantly acknowledged that it was for his depictions of
holidaymakers that he would always be remembered,
and he said 'I shall do something else but I shall always be a painter of beach
scenes.' But Trouville was also a fishing port and Boudin
did also paint the working Christian men and
women. In my next painting by the Dutch artist
Jacob Maris, 'A Beach', painted in the 1870s or 80s,
he likewise turns his attention to fishing.
Maris was a member of the Hague school, a group of artists
who took their inspiration from the dutch flat landscape, the sea,
and the fishing communities. He was born in the Hague and he settled back there
in 1871, and this picture was almost certainly painted on the beach in nearby
Scheveningen, which had a flourishing herring industry
from the late 19th century, but a harbour was not built until the
early 20th century, and bluff bowed fishing boats as in
these two on the right were pulled up onto the beach when not
in use. As with my other examples it is very
broadly painted, as you can see in this detail of the clouds.
I think the beach lends itself particularly to
brevora brushwork, more so than the kind of
delicate brush required to depict foliage of trees.
I'm reminded of the Constable. Maris paints the beach as a wild lonely place,
with man presented as a prey to the elements.
He's not painted a place for relaxed loafing on the sand,
even though at this period Scheveningen was also developing as a flourishing
seaside resort. Instead he focuses on a solitary figure of a fisherman
hauling a net up onto the beach, and the grey tonality,
the vast sky, the white horses on the waves, the clouds, particularly the dark
ones at the top, and the whirling birds at the centre,
give a sense of freshness and breeze, not without the threat of a storm. For my
last painting, I'm going to return to the world of leisure.
This is Edgar Degas' 'Beach Scene' painted in 1869-70, which is on display at the
High Lane Gallery in Dublin. The young girl in the foreground has
been swimming, and her nurse is combing through her wet hair.
Her swimsuit is laid out to dry next to her, with the parasol and basket.
It is very two-dimensional, and I always feel that it resembles the clothes
for a paper dress-up doll. In 1869 Degas visited the coast of Normandy where he
made a series of pastels of the cliffs and sea.
Aspects of this painting are based on these studies, particularly the sea itself
and the boats on the horizon, although note
that the smoke is blowing in two different directions.
Despite being a member of the Impressionist group, Degas was famously
adverse to painting out of doors, and this painting was absolutely painted
in the studio. It is painted in essence on paper, a
technique developed by Degas which entailed the thinning of oil paint
to create transparency and luminosity. He painted it on three
sheets of paper, starting with a central sheet,
and he finished with the one at the left where you can see an evident
difference in tone. There's extensive under drawing
some of which is visible to the naked eye, and it includes
large wheel like shapes, visible here in this detail which
might refer to the wheeled bathing machines which were a common sight on
beaches at this period. But for some reason Degas decided not
in the end to include them. So it is a picture in two parts, a
background based on naturalistic studies, and the posed group in the foreground.
In many ways Degas created his own virtual beach.
He said 'It is quite simple, I spread my funnel vest on the floor of the studio,
and had the model sit on it. You see the air you breathe in a picture
is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.' I think that he
is saying that you cannot capture the outdoors in a painting,
that it is impossible in paint to render the fresh air,
the smells and the sounds. Over the last months we've had a double
hit of neither being able to see these pictures in the flesh,
nor enjoy the kind of places which inspired them.
Instead in countless ways we've created our own virtual settings,
perhaps through a computer screen as we're doing now.
With the gallery now open if you are able you can come
again and see these pictures for yourselves,
but I also hope that this summer you'll be able to experience in real life
what the artists themselves experienced when they captured these scenes,
to smell the salty air, listen to the waves, and feel the breezes.
If you are interested in learning more about art history, click here,
or here. Thank you very much for watching, and we'll see you next time.