PAINTERS OF THE SOMME BAY
From Boudin to Manessier

For two centuries, the Bay of the Somme has continually inspired writers such as Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, Colette, Julian Gracq… and artists like Boudin, Daubigny, Dupré, Huet, Manessier, Braquaval and also Caudron: great and minor masters, both french and foreign, have been drawn here. The Boucher-de-Perthes museum is putting on a temporary exhibition of paintings consisting of works from French private and public collections ( the Museums of Amiens, Boulogne, Cambrai, L’Isle-Adam, Orléans, Reims ) which together celebrate one of the most beautiful bays in the world.

Motif Studies

In the XIXth century, the Bay of the Somme did not have the same reputation as its neighbours in Normandy or on the Opal coast. However it attracted, in an almost confidential manner, some important painters lured by the lights of the skies, the colours of the water, the stretches of sand and the picturesque charm of the fishing villages. The English watercolourists were the first to come and paint the coast, followed by French artists such as Léon Cogniet who from 1830 treated the cliffs of Ault in a Romantic style.The prolonged trips made by Eugène Boudin at Saint Valéry, between 1885 and 1891, revealed to the Impressionists an area close to Paris. Painting based on the motif created the opportunity for numerous landscape studies at Le Crotoy, Saint-Valéry and also Le Hourdel.

Representation and Abstraction

In the XXth century, the Bay of the Somme still seduced as many artists. Jules-Emile Zingg and Abel Bertram covered it quite regularly. As for Alfred Manessier, he had known these landscapes since his early childhood. From his figurative views of the port of Le Crotoy painted in the twenties to the series of thirty-six watercolours of Pebbles executed in 1977, from his large ink-washes of Sands, or the Bay of the Somme at night (1980), to the stained glass windows of the Saint-Sepulcre church of Abbeville - where non-figuration does not prevent us from remembering this treasured landscape - the Bay of the Somme shows itself to be one of the great sources of inspiration of this major XXth century artist.

PUBLICATION

Painters of the Bay of the Somme in the Impressionist Era by Hélène Brauener and Bénédicte Pradié-Ottinger. Tournai, La Renaissance du Livre, 2001. 27cm, 147 p., 95 photographs in colour, 45 euro.

AROUND THE EXHIBITION

Continuous screening of the film by François Maillart on the Somme Bay painters.
Conference Tours with the curator of the exhibition ; the first two will take place on 7 July and 16 August 2004 at 6.30pm.
In November, a presentation of graphic works – drawings, watercolours, etchings and postcards – from the Abbeville municipal library illustrating the Bay of the Somme.