Claude Monet Gallery

Honfleur

Honfleur is a harbor commune Norman (Calvados department) located on the south bank of the estuary of the Seine, opposite Le Havre, near the mouth of the Normandy Bridge.It has a population of 7913 inhabitants.She is best known for its picturesque Old Basin, characterized by its houses with facades covered with slate, and for having been repeatedly shown by artists, including Gustave Courbet, Eugene Boudin, Claude Monet and Johan Barthold Jongkind, forming the school of Honfleur which contributed to the development of the Impressionist movement. Alphonse Allais and Erik Satie were born in the same street.The town is classified four flowers in the competition of cities and villages flowered

© A Guillaume Chanson 2015

Traditional Japanese Woodblock snow scene

'Hiroshige Ando (1797-1858) is often considered, along with Hokusai, the greatest Japanese printmaking artist in the 19th century. He is best known for his landscape prints. His use of perspective is known to have influenced Western impressionists such as Van Gogh and Claude Monet. A woodblock print from the Edo period showing two figures walking on a bridge over the water towards a dwelling. One hatted figure carries a bundle over the shoulder, the other carries a parcel. This print forms part of my own private collection of original woodblock prints.'

© BernardAllum

Ships in a Harbour, Eugene Boudin (1824-1898)

Oil on panel, French School, 19th century. Eugene Louis Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores. Corot called him the 'king of the skies'. He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1853 and late in his career began to receive prizes and accolades for his work. In 1857/1858 Boudin befriended the young Claude Monet, then only 18, and persuaded him to give up his teenage caricature drawings and to become a landscape painter. He helped to instil in him a love of colour and light and of how these can be enhanced by their reflection in water. The two remained lifelong friends and Monet later paid tribute to Boudin's early influence. Boudin joined Monet and his young friends in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1873, but never considered himself a radical or innovator. Boudin was made a member of the Legion d'Honneur in 1892

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