Rugged men, ragged rocks - and all just five hours from the Louvre

Impressionists by the Sea

Royal Academy

LONDON

You may well not associate the names "Bognor" and "Eastbourne" with the word "modern", as British resorts conjure up visions of maiden aunts and tea on the prom. This was not the case in mid-19th century France, as the Royal Academy's new show, Impressionists by the Sea, points out.

For Monet and Manet, towns such as Deauville and tretat were the dernier cri, a model of modernity that owed itself to a trio of Brits. George III had made sea-bathing fashionable in the 1790s; in 1829, Stephenson invented the steam engine that would shorten the journey from Paris to the Normandy coast; and Turner, that hero of the Impressionists, had celebrated the modernity of railways in his great Rain, Steam and Speed in 1844. Much has been made of the way train travel changed how the Impressionists saw and painted, and this transformation extended to the railways' termini. Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare is all about modernity at one end of the tracks. His Htel des Roches Noires, Trouville is also about modernity at the other.

But newness wasn't the first thing that struck artists when they stepped down from their hissing carriages at Dieppe and Fecamp. The initial wave of painters to visit the coast - lesser-known names such as Jules Breton and Eugene Isabey - found not Paris-sur-Mer but anti-Paris: a race of Rousseauvian savages doing rugged things in picturesque costumes, and all just five hours from the Louvre. It wasn't until that much overlooked master, Eugene-Louis Boudin, set up his easel on the beach that the modernity of towns such as Trouville became a subject for art. "Three strokes of the brush in front of nature are worth more than two days in the studio," Boudin said, although it is his frocks we remember rather than his seascapes.

As its title suggests, Boudin's delightful The Empress Eugenie on the Beach at Trouville shows just how fashionable the Norman coast had become by 1863. But, although the picture clearly influenced Monet's later Trouville pictures, it is different from them in having been finished in a studio. Boudin may have sketched en plein air, but his canvases were done indoors. "He is not so pretentious as to claim that his sketches are finished pictures," sniffed Baudelaire, consigning his friend to the second rank of history.

By contrast, Monet's Htel des Roches Noires, Trouville is painted on the spot, its buffeting flags echoing the artist's own windswept canvas. Woven into the picture is that sense of quickness which would become the trademark of Impressionism. Made two years before Impression: soleil levant, the work that gave the movement its name, Htel des Roches Noires suggests Monet did-n't just go to the seaside; in a sense, he was born there.

Hand in hand with this change in the rules of how a painting should be made went a new sense of whom it might be made for. A canvas such as Htel des Roches Noires is certainly not a Salon piece: at 19"x30", it isn't big enough. Working in a garden at Giverny was one thing, working on a beach at Trouville was quite another. Painting urgently meant painting small. One result of this was that the Impressionist's seaside pictures would be relatively affordable, and of a convenient size for the new apartments of Baron Haussmann's Paris. With all this went a rise in the importance of dealers such as Monet's Paul Durand-Ruel, whose shops turned art from a haute-couture product to an off-the-peg one. Trips to the seaside may have sprung from technological advances, but they spawned a revolution of their own.

Or rather a series of revolutions, for this dazzling novelty, the seaside, meant different things to different painters. For Manet, it was the lack of a rule-book that mattered most. Like Monet, the freedom to paint new things in a new way meant finding a new language of the brush: Manet's Low Tide at Berck is astonishing in its lack of finish, its calligraphic brio. But unlike Monet, Manet seems less excited by representing the seaside than by playing with the social possibilities it might afford. His Women on the Beach explores the erotic quality of what, for 1873, counts as acres of newly-exposed female flesh; his On the Beach: Suzanne and Eugene Manet at Berck has the same postcoital flatness as Le dejeuner sur l'herbe. It is hard, now, to think of the coast as an unknown land, a place of infinite possibility; but that's what it was, and its impact on French art was huge.

To 30 September (020 7300 8000)

Further reading To discover more about Paul Durand-Ruel, read Pierre Assouline's 'Discovering Impressionism'

Copyright 2007 Independent Newspapers UK Limited. All rights owned or operated by The Independent.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.