Image: Jean Francis Auburtin, Les Pêcheries. Falaises de Pourville. Giverny, musée des impressionnismes / Photo : Jean-Charles Louiset
The musée des impressionnismes Giverny has published a collection feature on the Norman coast, 'De Port-en-Bessin à Dieppe. Les marines normandes de la collection du musée des impressionnismes', circulated in its newsletter of 11 August 2026. It is a selection of works from the museum's own holdings rather than a temporary exhibition, and no dates or public programme are attached to it.
On the museum's article page, the collection is given as close to 400 works, grouped by genre and by theme, with the Giverny landscapes and the views of the Normandy coast — seascapes, harbours, cliffs — standing out among the larger groups. The text traces how nineteenth-century painters turned to the coast as landscape became a subject in its own right, helped by paint in tubes and by the new railway lines from Paris to Rouen in 1843, Le Havre in 1847 and Dieppe in 1848.
Eugène Boudin is the central figure. Born in Honfleur, he met Claude Monet in 1856, and the museum's holdings include his 'La Poissonnerie de Trouville' (1875) and 'Deauville, le bassin' (1884), together with two pastels, 'Soleil couchant sur l'estuaire de la Seine vers Honfleur' and 'La Plage de Bénerville, coucher de soleil', also known as 'Les Vaches noires' (1894). Baudelaire's nickname for him, "roi des ciels", is cited for his treatment of coastal skies. Paul Signac is represented by 'Étude Port-en-Bessin (étude n°5, l'avant-port)', painted in July and August 1882 when he was barely eighteen, and Jean Francis Auburtin by 'Varengeville. Rayons jaunes aux falaises de Mordal' and 'Les Pêcheries. Falaises de Pourville', both given by Francine and Michel Quentin in 2019 and read by the museum as poised between atmospheric impressionism and symbolist allegory.
The newsletter pairs the feature with a recent acquisition: Auguste Bougourd's 'Plage aux environs de Honfleur' (1861), bought in 2025 and the first work by the Norman painter to enter the collection. Born in Pont-Audemer, where he was also curator of the town's museum, Bougourd set out to record Normandy from the coast to the interior in watercolour and oil.
The museum notes that although this Honfleur beach view recalls a vantage point Monet painted at almost the same moment, Bougourd does not appear to have sought out the pre-impressionist painters working above the town. Trained in the tradition of the "paysage composé" by his master Jacques-Joseph Bellel, he built the picture in the studio from curving lines and planes of colour rather than from light observed outdoors, while sharing the plein-air painters' admiration for the Barbizon masters Camille Corot and Théodore Rousseau. The acquisition, the museum says, helps visitors grasp a period in which the memory of historical landscape still coexisted with a new painting made in front of nature. A quotation from Frédéric Bazille, written from Honfleur on 1 June 1864, and Monet's 'Nymphéas avec rameaux de saule' also feature in the newsletter.
