CAMILLE PISSARO (1830-1903)
Les Petites Dalles (30 to 50 m - 98 to164 ft)
France
France
In Les falaises des Petites Dalles, oil on canvas, 1883, Private collection USA
The painting
A lot of impressionist painters choose those cliffs as a item. The most famous was Claude Monet who made at least 10 paintings of those cliffs.
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.
The Painter
Camille Pissarro was a Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.
In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the "pivotal" figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the "dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality". Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord," and he was also one of Gauguin's masters. Renoir referred to his work as "revolutionary", through his artistic portrayals of the "common man", as Pissarro insisted on painting individuals in natural settings without "artifice or grandeur".
Pissarro is the only artist to have shown his work at all eight Paris Impressionist exhibitions, from 1874 to 1886. He "acted as a father figure not only to the Impressionists" but to all four of the major Post-Impressionists, including Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
