Most Europeans are drawn to the sea, and for those living in Paris and the cities of the north of France in the nineteenth century, that meant the chain of coastal towns on the southern shore of the Channel, like Honfleur, to the south of the sprawling port of Le Havre. To the north, on the other side of Le Havre, are the chalk cliffs of Étretat, and to the west is the series of resorts sometimes known as the Côte Fleurie, or Flowery Coast. This weekend I show a few of the paintings made by a succession of major artists of this tiny port with a population of less than ten thousand.

As is sometimes the case, Honfleur was discovered by a foreign artist, Richard Parkes Bonington from Britain.

Bonington’s skilful use of transparent watercolour in painterly views of the Normandy coast inspired many professionals and amateurs to try their hand with watercolours. They became a standard part of the education of young ladies, and royal endorsement by Queen Victoria herself made proficiency at watercolour painting essential to those women who sought to marry ‘well’. This view, painted in about 1823, shows what I believe to be the southern bank of the Seine just up-river from Honfleur.

In about 1830, when he had just joined the Barbizon school, Camille Corot visited the town and painted Honfleur: Calvary, with the shore of Le Havre in the distance.

Fifteen years later, when Baudelaire had declared that Corot was the leader of the “modern school of landscape painting”, he returned to stay at The Toutain Farm, Honfleur (c 1845), which became popular with a succession of landscape artists, and Baudelaire. This was one of the first motifs in which Corot’s trees broke out of repoussoir and crossed the centre of the image, a device taken up later by his pupil Pissarro. The Toutain Farm is better-known as Saint-Siméon, became a haven for artists, and is now a luxury hotel.

Eugène Boudin was born in Honfleur in 1824, shortly after Bonington had painted there.

Boudin’s The Beach at Villerville from 1864 shows a dusk setting unusual among his beach paintings. This is a small seaside community a few kilometres along the coast to the west of Honfleur. By this time, Boudin had become mentor to the aspiring artist Claude Monet, who lived on the other side of the Seine estuary in Le Havre.

Just five years before he painted Bathers at la Grenouillère, Monet’s Boatyard near Honfleur (1864) is still pre-Impressionist in style, and influenced by Boudin.

The following year, Monet’s The Mouth of the Seine, Honfleur (1865) is becoming looser in its brushstrokes as he makes the transition to Impressionism.

Johan Barthold Jongkind, who was living in Paris at the time, joined Boudin and Monet to paint in and around Honfleur.

In the summer of 1866, Jongkind painted this view of the Quay in Honfleur, another step towards Impressionism.

For a while in the 1860s, Boudin painted celebrities including Princess Pauline Metternich on the Beach (1865-7) when they visited the seaside around Honfleur, but as he became more successful in the Salon, he dropped these opportunistic sketches.

Tomorrow I’ll resume with the first Impressionist paintings of Honfleur, and progress through Neo-Impressionism to art of the early twentieth century.