The Étaples art colony was a fin de siècle artists' retreat situated near the fishing port of Étaples, in northern France. The colony experienced its heyday between 1880 and 1914 before the outbreak of World War I led to its disruption. Although cosmopolitan in composition, the majority of inhabitants were Anglophone artists from North America, Australasia and the British Isles. While some artists settled permanently, others remained at the colony for a sole season, or an even shorter time as it was common for Bohemian painters of this period to lead a peripatetic existence, travelling between the various art colonies situated along the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Stylistically, the Étaples artists represent a diverse range of schools with certain common interests, including a preoccupation with the landscape of the region, the proper use of natural light, as well as a shared interest in the lives of the common folk, fishermen and peasants, of the region. While most painters left the town in 1914 at the outbreak of war, artistic activities continued at Étaples during the conflict, pursued by artists in uniform and war artists. Following the Treaty of Versailles which ended the war, some artists returned to their studios and the persistence of a small colony continued to attract visitors to the area, although little outstanding work now resulted.
Early decades
The first French artists to paint in the area were those particularly associated with plein air painting. Charles-François Daubigny retreated there from the outbreak of the Paris Commune in 1871, where he spent his time drawing and executed at least one oil painting of beached boats (Gallery 3). Norman-born Eugène Boudin frequently painted along the Opal Coast and spent long periods in both Étaples and at Berck. Henri Le Sidaner, who was brought up in Dunkirk, spent the years 1885–1894 in the town and represented the area in all seasons. There he was joined between 1887 and 1893 by his childhood friend Eugène Chigot (1860–1923), who shared his interest in atmospheric light and afterwards went to stay in Paris Plage.
The heyday of the colony began around 1880. More than 200 artists from France, Britain, America and Australia had settled in the Étaples area. In 1887 also, Eugène Vail (1857–1934), moved to Étaples and spent the winter there, lodging with his Irish friend Frank O'Meara, whose letters home give us information about the colony at that time. Amongst the other artists working there were Boudin and Francis Tattegrain, several more Irish, the English Dudley Hardy, the Americans Walter Gay and L. Birge Harrison, and the Australian Eleanor Ritchie, whom Harrison met there and married. While the rest were painting tranquil figures down at the harbour or in the woods, O'Meara describes Vail as "painting the deck of a fishing boat in a heavy sea, life-size". This was "Ready, About!", which won a first-class gold medal in the Paris Salon of 1888. In the following decade, Vail's Norwegian associate Frits Thaulow was to spend some time in Étaples while André Derain stopped there and in Montreuil-sur-mer during the summer of 1909.
The colony that was in the process of being formed in Étaples and neighbouring villages such as Trépied, a mile away on the south bank of the river Canche, was in reality made up largely of English-speaking expatriates who needed to live cheaply. As Blanche McManus was to comment two decades later in the record of her travels, "the colony has been formed by buying up, or renting, the fishermen's cottages at nominal prices and turning them into studios. Such is the popularity of art that the native fisher people importune one to be taken on for models with as much insistence as the beggars of Naples appeal to strangers for money."
Her account is supplemented by Jane Quigley's description of life there published in 1907. "The usual plan is to live in rooms or studios and eat at the Hotel des Voyageurs or Hotel Joos – unpretentious hostelries with fairly good meals, served in an atmosphere of friendliness and stimulating talk. In winter the place is deserted, except by a group of serious workers who make it their home. Artists pay about twenty-five or thirty francs a week for board and rooms, and studios are cheap. Étaples has been called – and not without reason – a dirty little town, but it is healthy for all that. The artistic sense finds pleasure in its winding cobbled streets and mellow old houses and in the dark-complexioned southern looking people. Models are plentiful and pose well for a small payment, either in the studio or in the picturesque gardens that lie hidden behind the street doors. A great source of interest is the fishing fleet that comes up the estuary of the Canche to the quays where the fisher people and shrimpers live in a colony of their own. There is constant work for the sketch book, especially on Monday, when the boats go off for several days, the whole family helping the men and boys to start. All one can do amid this bewildering movement of boats putting up sail, and people bustling about with provisions, is to make hurried notes and sketches."
Styles and subjects
A review of a 2011 exhibition in Étaples refers to the École d'Étaples and the large Étaples artist colony. The exhibition showed local paintings from between 1880 and 1914. Art ranged from the plein-air style of artists' colonies to the south, through Impressionism to Post Impressionism. Subject matter was obviously varied. However, two broad tendencies can be observed in their work. One is the treatment of light, that recommended itself to those of an Impressionist tendency, such as Boudin and Le Sidaner among the French and Wilson Steer from England. The other tendency among the artists was to follow the Realism of such painters as Jules Bastien-Lepage and Jean-François Millet in their choice of humble everyday subjects – in the case of Étaples, the life of the fisherfolk. There are good examples in the work of the American Louis Paul Dessar, who was in the town between 1886 and 1901, and the Anglo-Australian Tudor St. George Tucker, whose first major painting, "A Picardy Shrimp Fisher", was executed in Étaples. William Gerard Barry's "Time Flies" and Birge Harrison's "The Return of the Mayflower", mentioned above, are works of the same tendency.
Gallery 1: Light effects
One particular focus of attention as a subject was the town's fish market, built in 1872 and now a maritime museum. Examples include "Fish Market, Etaples", shown in 1913 at the annual exhibition of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts by Clara S. Haggarty (1871–1958), and two exhibited at the 1907 Royal Academy exhibition in England: the Australian James Peter Quinn's "Fish Market at Étaples", and "A corner of the market, Etaples" by the animal artist Evelyn Harke (fl.1899–1930). Etchings were also made, two of which are singled out in Whitman's Print Collector's Handbook (1918): Nelson Dawson's aquatint "Halles aux poisons" (1911), made after a visit to the town in 1910 and now in Georgetown University, and William Lee Hankey's "Fish Market at Étaples", now in the British Museum. The latter depicts baskets of fish on display in a stone hall with two women seated in the left foreground, bending towards one another as they talk, while men walk past them carrying baskets.
The market outside was equally popular, a subject bringing together folk in their distinctive local dress which was particularly adapted to the kind of saleable genre subjects that many of these artists were producing. It is shown in the oil paintings "Market Day" by the English William Holt Yates Titcomb (see Gallery 2), "Market at Etaples" by the Australian Marie Tuck (1866–1947 and "Market Scene at Etaples" by her compatriot Iso Rae (1860–1940). There was also the charcoal and crayon drawing "Le Marché à Etaples" by Hilda Rix (1884–1961), another Australian, and "Market Place, Étaples", a watercolour by the Irish artist Mima Nixon (1861–1939) that was displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1909.
There is evidence also of a social conscience in the paintings of some artists that is manifested in the depiction of their subjects. Walter Gay's "November" might perhaps be dismissed as merely picturesque, a posed portrayal of a peasant woman at the not particularly arduous task of hoeing her cabbage patch (Gallery 4). But George Clausen's depiction of the back-breaking work of "Gathering Potatoes", painted at nearby Dannes in 1887, reflects concerns that are a constant in his output of the time. It was then too that he began to distance himself from those championing Impressionist effects precisely because drawing attention principally to technique takes it away from any other motivation for choosing the subject portrayed.
Elizabeth Nourse's "Fisher Girl of Picardy" (Gallery 2) is another example. Painted on a blustery day in 1889, Nourse's friend Anna Schmidt later described the circumstances: "I was with Elizabeth when she painted that girl on the Etaples Dunes – it was so cold and windy the model used to weep."
Gallery 2: Fisher-folk
Nationalities
a) Americans The painters of two of the colony's nationalities, Americans and Australians, have been the subject of special studies. Among the earliest Americans to visit the town were Walter Gay, who was making a name for himself with Realist subjects at the time, and Robert Reid, whose long career as a painter of young women in outside settings began with portraits of peasants in Étaples before his return to the U.S. in 1889. Another early visitor was Homer Dodge Martin, who was painting on the coast between 1882 and 1886. His work included a topographical view of the harbour (Gallery 3).
In 1889 the Paris-based salon genre painter, Elizabeth Nourse, included the town on her tour. She created paintings there including "Milk Carrier", "Fisher Girl of Picardy", "An Etaples Fair" and "Street Scene". Later on Eanger Couse moved to the town and lived there between 1893 and 1896, painting its streetsSaginaw Images – Street Scene, Etaples and fisher folk. His "Coastal Scene, Etaples" is particularly worth noting for its interpretation of light. Myron Barlow (1873–1937) also had a home in Étaples from the late 1890s to his death and specialised particularly in figures in interiors. Among his students there was Norwood Hodge MacGilvary (1874–1949), who studied under him in the years 1904–6.
Max Bohm lived in the area between 1895 and 1904. Described as a romantic visionary, his heroic depiction of Étaples fishermen, "En Mer" (see Gallery 3), received a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1898. He then moved out of the town to Trépied and while there founded the Société Artistique de Picardie which took over arranging the annual exhibitions of work by local artists started in 1892 by Eugène Chigot. In 1912 the society's president was George Senseney (1874-1943), who was listed as still living in Etaples in a catalogue of works by American etchers the following year.
In 1913 Senseney was succeeded as president by the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, who had been driven abroad by prejudice and had settled in Trépied. Early in his career, Tanner painted marine scenes that showed man's struggle with the sea, but by 1895 he was creating mostly religious works. The simple resources at Étaples were well adapted to his subject matter, which in several cases featured Biblical figures in dark interiors. Occasionally Tanner played host at Trépied to a fellow African-American, William Edouard Scott, who painted there off and on between 1910 and 1914. In fact Tanner's son claims that he was largely responsible for establishing the foreign artistic milieu at Etaples, often entertaining up to 100 people at his Trépied summer home.