Étaples art colony
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.
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).
[3] In 1887 also, Eugène Vail (1857–1934), moved to Étaples and spent the winter there, lodging with his Irish friend Frank O'Meara,[3] whose letters home give us information about the colony at that time.
[citation needed] 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'.
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.
[5] 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.
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,[8] and the Anglo-Australian Tudor St. George Tucker, whose first major painting, "A Picardy Shrimp Fisher", was executed in Étaples.
[18] There was also the charcoal and crayon drawing "Le Marché à Etaples" by Hilda Rix (1884–1961), another Australian,[19] and "Market Place, Étaples", a watercolour by the Irish artist Mima Nixon (1861–1939) that was displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1909.
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,[21] 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.
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,[citation needed] 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.
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[33] 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.
[38] 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.
[41] Other visitors to the area included the landscapist George W. Picknell (1864–1943)[42] and the maritime artist John "Wichita Bill" Noble (1874–1934),[43] 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[44] while Augustus Koopman (1869–1914) kept a studio in Étaples from 1908 and died there in 1914.
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".
Among the students that followed him down was his fellow countrywoman Marie Tuck (1866–1947), who paid for her tuition by cleaning out his studio and came to live in Étaples between 1907 and 1914,[50] and Arthur Baker-Clack (1877–1955), another Australian, who settled in Trépied in 1910.
[53] Two Australian women are particularly notable: Iso(bel) Rae (1860–1940), who joined the colony in 1890 and exhibited in the Paris Salons, and Emily Hilda Rix (1884–1961), who maintained a studio in Étaples between 1911 and 1914.
While there she executed the paintings "An old peasant woman in my garden", later bought by the National Gallery of Victoria,[54] "Picardy Girl" (1913)[55] and the pastel drawing "There is a Dear Old Fairy Godmother who Poses for Us".
[70] But it was his black and white and coloured etchings of the people of the town, several developed from these paintings,[71] which gained him a reputation as 'one of the most gifted of the figurative printmakers working in original drypoint during the first thirty years of the 20th century'.
The two friends John Duncan Fergusson and Samuel Peploe regularly painted together at Paris Plage[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81] between 1904 and 1909 on visits which also included sessions in Étaples.
[87] A rather more permanent resident in the area was the slightly older Scot, Thomas Austen Brown (1857–1924), who was living in the nearby village of Camiers to the north and whose work was characteristically Impressionist.
Gallery 5: Prints Among those painters known as Irish Impressionists[90] were the peripatetic William Gerard Barry and the short-lived Frank O'Meara, whose early visit to Étaples has already been mentioned.
Sarah Cecilia Harrison, noted for her paintings of children and landscapes, was there in 1890 and her "On the road to Étaples" was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy the following year.
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.
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.
