CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)
Les Petites Dalles (30 to 50m - 98 to164ft)
France
1. In Marée basse aux Petites Dalles, 1884, oil on canvas, Private collection
2. In La falaise des petites dalles en 1884, oil en canvas, Kreeger Museum, Washington DC
3. In La falaise d'Amont, 1881, oil on canvas, Private collection
4. In Falaise près de Dieppe, 1882, oil on canvas, Private collection
5. In Falaises des Petites Dalles, 1880, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Claude Monet and Les Petites Dalles
Claude Monet first came to Les Petites-Dalles for a fortnight in September 1880. He then returned regularly for seven years, from 1881 to 1886. He went down to his brother Léon who lived in one of the villas Saint-Jean. Léon (Léon Pascal Monet domiciled in Rouen) bought this villa, or rather the land, on Aug. 9, 1875. At least 10 paintings (oil on canvas) were painted at Les Petites-Dalles by Claude Monet: 2 in 1880, 4 in 1881 and 4 in 1884. All but one of 1884 represent the cliffs.
The mountain
Les Petites Dalles (30 to 50m - 98 to 164ft) (the Small Slabs) are cliffs located in a hamlet between Sassetot-le-Mauconduit and Saint-Martin-aux-Buneaux, in Haute-Normandie, France.
Seaside resort south of Dieppe in Normandy, on the coast of the Channel and the country of Caux, the Petites Dalles cliffs are famous mainly because they inspired the impressionist painters like Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot. it is also famous for its numerous seaside villas built at the end of the nineteenth century and preserved (Les Catelets, Les Lampottes, Les Mouettes...)
The old name for Les Petites Dalles appears in the Latinized form Daletis in a charter of 1252. It is the diminutive of Dalis which appears in the same charter. Dalis became Les Grandes-Dalles and Daletis, Les Petites Dalles.
The place became definitely up to date in 187,5 when the Empress of Austria, Elisabeth, known as Sissi, spent the months of August and September at the castle of Sassetot-le-Mauconduit and regularly bathes on the beach of Les Petites Dalles. The painter Paul Valantin realizes a painting of the scene. On August 25, 2016, a landslide over a hundred meters of the cliff felt down. Nearly 50,000 m3 of rocks collapsed on the beach in Saint-Martin-aux-Buneaux at the place known as Les Petites Dalles, according to the Seine-Maritime Fire and Rescue Service.
Source:
- lespetitesdalles official website (in French)
The painter
Oscar-Claude Monet better known as Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting « Impression, soleil levant » (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.
Monet's ambition of documenting the French countryside led him to adopt a method of painting the same scene many times in order to capture the changing of light and the passing of the seasons exactly like the japanese artist Hokusai (1760-1849) did with his 36 views of Mount Fuji.
Monet has been described as "the driving force behind Impressionism". Crucial to the art of the Impressionist painters was the understanding of the effects of light on the local colour of objects, and the effects of the juxtaposition of colours with each other. Monet's long career as a painter was spent in the pursuit of this aim....
- More about Claude Monet's Life and works
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2017 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
2017 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
