Normandy on Canvas

Normandy on Canvas

Long before Claude Monet created his Giverny lily pond by diverting the Epte River that marks the boundary with Ile-de-France, artists had been scudding into Normandy. For two watery reasons: the Seine and the sea. Just downstream from Vernon, where the Epte joins the Seine, Richard the Lionhearted's ruined castle at Les Andelys, immortalized by Paul Signac and Félix Vallotton, heralds the soft-lit, cliff-lined Seine Valley, impressionistically evoked by Albert Lebourg and Gustave Loiseau in the Arts Museum in Rouen -- where Camille Corot once studied, and whose mighty cathedral Monet painted 'til he was pink, purple, and blue in the face.

The Seine joins the sea at Le Havre, where Monet grew up, a protégé of Eugène Boudin, often termed the precursor of Impressionism. Boudin would boat across the estuary from Honfleur, where he hobnobbed with Gustave Courbet, Charles Daubigny, and Alfred Sisley at the Ferme St-Siméon. Le Havre in the 1860s was base-camp for Monet and his pals Frédéric Bazille and Johan Barthold Jongkind to explore the rugged coast up to Dieppe, with easels opened en route beneath the cliffs of Étretat.

The railroad from Gare St-Lazare (smokily evoked by Monet) put Dieppe within easy reach of Paris. Eugène Delacroix daubed seascapes here in 1852. Auguste Renoir visited Dieppe from 1878 to 1885; Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas clinked glasses here in 1885; Camille Pissarro painted his way from Gisors to Dieppe in the 1890s. As the nearest port to Paris, Dieppe wowed the English, too. Walter Sickert moved in from 1898 to 1905, and artists from the Camden Town Group he founded back in London often painted in Dieppe before World War I.

Named for the Norsemen who claimed this corner of Gaul and sent a famous conqueror over the Channel in 1066, and eternally tied in our memory to the D-Day landings, Normandy has always played shuttle diplomat in Anglo-French relations. From its half-timber houses to its green apple orchards to its rich dairy cream, it seems to mirror the culture of its English neighbor across the water. Treasures beckon: Mont-St-Michel, elegant Deauville, Rouen's great cathedral and museums, the legendary Bayeux Tapestry…and those warming glasses of calvados. With three days you can get a feel for the region. Five days gives you time to meander through the countryside and down the coast. And with nine days, if you don't spend much time in any one place, you can see most of Normandy.