Monet happy returns: Normandy celebrates 150 years of impressionism

25.03.2024 - 12:55 / theguardian.com / Claude Monet / Art

‘Every day I’m here, the sky and the sea are different,” says Anastasia Kharchenko, as an incessant drizzle patters on our umbrellas. “Sometimes you can’t even see the horizon because it’s so foggy, but in certain months the colours are just breathtaking.”

We’re standing on a grassy bluff above the town of Étretat on Normandy’s wind-sculpted Alabaster coast, its ragged chalk cliffs looking out into the Channel’s wild waters. Kharchenko is the head of cultural partnerships at the Jardins d’Étretat, a collection of intricately designed gardens that twist and curl down the hillside, dotted with quirky neo-futurist art installations. I apologise for bringing the grim English weather, as we look toward Étretat’s famous chalk arch and needle rock formations, extending from the cliffs like an arm leaning lazily into the raging waves below.

Claude Monet was a regular visitor here in the late 19th century and painted this dramatic coast just north of Le Havre over 100 times, precisely because these capricious weather conditions added so much atmosphere to his work. But while Monet and the rest of the impressionists were famous for their ethereal depictions of outdoor life here and in the genteel Normandy countryside, their work was seen together for the first time, 150 years ago, inside a Paris photography studio.

Disillusioned by the haughty traditional tastes of the Paris Salon, this band of artistic revolutionaries (which included Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne) held their pioneering impressionist exhibition in April 1874. This year the Normandie Impressioniste 2024 festival – beginning 22 March – is hosting a range of events to mark the 150th anniversary of this landmark moment in art, with shows in coastal hotspot Deauville, Caen and many more across the region.

One of the works on display in 1874 was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, a hazy loosely brushed depiction of the industrial port of Le Havre with a red morning sun reflecting on the water. Painted in 1872, it’s considered the first impressionist painting and became notorious largely thanks to condescending remarks by critic Louis Leroy, who unwittingly coined the term “impressionism” in a review published in the magazine Le Charivari on 25 April 1874: “Impression, I was certain of it. A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.”

Monet grew up in Le Havre, and at first sight the modern city is anything but the dreamy cradle of impressionism one might picture. After taking a two-hour train west from Paris, I emerge from Le Havre’s station into the stocky and expansive Cours de la République. The tram to my hotel glides along the wide Boulevard de Strasbourg, flanked by an orderly mass of concrete apartments – the