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1852-1931
LA PLAGE À TROUVILLE

26.2 by 34.7cm., 10 3/8 by 13 5/8 in.

Painted circa 1885.

signed J. L. Forain and inscribed Trouville (lower right)

oil on panel

To be included in the forthcoming Jean-Louis Forain Catalogue raisonné being prepared by Mme Valdès Forain.

NOTE

This exquisite work depicts Trouville, a Normandy coastal town which was 'discovered' by the artist Charles Mozin in the 1820s. It soon became a favoured summer haunt for artists and the Parisian upper classes, earning itself the accolade la reine des plages, a title it held for half a century. Monet visited in the summer of 1870, having just married Camille in Paris. Eight of the nine paintings he made at Trouville deal with the society of holiday-makers the resort attracted, and five are studies of women, dressed in fashionable summer attire, on the beach.

Forain continues this tradition in this beach scene painted some 15 years later. Here is Forain as an Impressionist, far removed from Forain as the eminent satirist/cartoonist - the role for which he is best known. In contrast to his social cartoons, Forain preoccupies himself in this work with the painterly concerns of Impressionism, displaying a free, broad and almost disjointed treatment of form, and investigating the effect of the sunlight on the landscape. Forain had first exhibited in the fourth Impressionist exhibition of 1879, and continued to exhibit with them for the following two years as well as in their final exhibition of 1886. This introduction had been facilitated by Degas who was, by that time, a close friend and mentor to Forain. The subjects of Forain's first period comprised the then fashionable café and theatre scenes, Folies, and portraits.

Unlike the women who are the subjects of Monet's beach studies, the subject of Forain's painting is not personalised, she does not dominate the foreground in the same way that Monet's Camille and her cousin do (fig. I). We can only glimpse the profile of this lady as she looks across the beach, and she is very nearly upstaged by an unsteady chair... This is not a portrait, one can perhaps see more of Degas influence, whose disassociation from the female subjects of his paintings is well documented. It is the open waterfront of Trouville that is the true subject of the work.