Étaples art colony

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 preoccipation 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 WW1, 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 open 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

Nationalities

 * a) Americans
 * 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 streets 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.

Also staying in the village during this decade was Max Bohm's friend Chauncey Ryder (1868-1949). As soon as he quitted the farmhouse he was renting in 1907, he was succeeded there by the landscape artist Roy Brown (1879–1956), who was to stay until war broke out in 1914.

Other visitors to the area included the landscapist George W. Picknell (1864–1943) and the maritime artist John "Wichita Bill" Noble (1874–1934), both of whom spent some years in France at that time. Of the other painters of marine subjects associated with the town, Frederick Frary Fursman (1874–1943) spent summers there between 1906 and 1909 while Augustus Koopman (1869–1914) kept a studio in Étaples from 1908 and died there in 1914. Yet another visitor was Caleb Arnold Slade (1882-1961), who made annual stays for some seven years until 1915. His "Moonlight at Etaples" looks over the glimmering Canche to the silhouetted buildings of Trépied on the ridge behind and justifies his description as an American Impressionist.

Students were attracted into the area to study with some of these artists. Writing in 1907, Jane Quigley testified of Max Bohm that 'He attracts a following of students by his power as a teacher and the vigorous and sincere personality which exacts good work from all who come under his influence". This was certainly so of the New Zealand artist Samuel Hales (1868–1953), whose painting "La Nuit" was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1897. A later student was the English Jessica Dismorr, who studied with Bohm in 1904 and went on to adopt a Fauvist and then a Vorticist style.

Gallery 3: Boats

Aftermath
With the outbreak of war, the artists in the colony scattered elsewhere.

Some American artists also hung on for a while. Writing in the New York Times in February 1915, the newly returned Arnold Slade gave an account of the military build-up in the area. He also mentioned how American artists in the town had volunteered for 12-hour shifts feeding troops as they passed through the station. But almost the only artist to stay on in Étaples throughout the war and record the military activity there was Iso Rae. While working for the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the British Red Cross between 1915 and 1919, she produced about 200 pastel drawings of the army camp and the life of the soldiers there.

Another medical volunteer connected with the camp was the Yorkshireman Fred Lawson (1888–1968), who painted a watercolour of the town. There were also a few who painted among those in uniform. William McDougall Anderson (1883–1917) was a Scottish stained glass artist who served as a Lance Corporal and made a few studies while passing through Étaples in October 1916.

Two war artists were present during the German air raid on Étaples in May 1918 which also targeted the hospitals. Austin Spare, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps, recorded the scene of devastation left by the raid. J. Hodgson Lobley (1878–1954), also serving in the RAMC at the time, pictured men constructing an underground dug-out which would serve as a shelter. John Lavery, one of the official British war artists, had been prevented by illness from leaving the country during the war but visited Étaples in 1919. Moved by the sight of the war cemetery that was served then only by a few women VADs, before it was officially designated by the War Graves Commission, he painted it in its sandy starkness. He also painted the officers' convalescent home over the bridge in privileged Le Touquet.

Soldier poets also passed through the camp at Étaples, among them Wilfred Owen, who commented unfavourably upon it. The author J.R.R. Tolkien 'wrote a poem about England' while passing through on his way to the front in 1915. C.S. Lewis was injured in 1918 and wrote many of the poems in his Spirits in Bondage (1919) while in the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Étaples. A longer-term resident was Iso Rae's fellow volunteer, Vera Brittain, whose Verses of a V.A.D. (1918) was written while working in the military hospital and drew on her experiences there. Muriel Stuart also devoted a poem to the town in her first collection, which included several references to the war:


 * 'Étaples', a strange, vague word
 * Spelled on the lips of the guns
 * Where all that our wild hearts loved
 * Went through with the regiment once!

A few resident artists from the colony came back after the war, among them Myron Barlow, Arthur Baker-Clack and Henry Tanner, who had been working for the American Red Cross in France. In 1923 he was made a knight of the Legion of Honour for his work as an artist – as was Barlow in 1932. Iso Rae moved out of Étaples to Trépied, where she stayed until 1932, with Tanner as a neighbour. Tanner's biographer records, 'life at Trépied was never to be what it had been before the war. An artists' colony still existed...but something was missing. Many of the old crowd did not return and those who did were less in step with the times.'