Versions of the page can be found in the Internet Archive. At that site, select a blue circled calendar date. Thanks to the vision and political clout of former French premier Laurent Fabius, who is now president of the Normandy region, this coordinated group of exhibitions and related activities eclipsed Parisian summer offerings in the mind of the French and much of the international public. The son of a Paris antique dealer, Fabius has a keen and long-standing artistic sensibility.
During most of our tour of the exhibitions of the festival, my wife Liliane and I stayed at a friend's house in the still posh Le Havre suburb of Sainte-Adresse. Our view of the harbor was much like that of Monet's aunt Sophie Lecadre, from the window of whose villa Monet supposedly painted The Terrace at Sainte-Adresse fig.
While dining in two different local restaurants on two different nights in Le Havre, we met two very different French couples who were following an itinerary similar to ours.
Obviously, the Normandie impressionniste festival had its economic as well as cultural benefits. This travelogue written in the present tense reflects the immediacy of our experiences. The museum is a large Beaux-Arts style building with impressive entry halls and a magnificent atrium through which one enters the exhibition and which the visitor must cross a second time in order to get from the first half of the exhibition to the rest.
The museum faces a lovely little park in the center of town on what is now called the Place Marcel Duchamp. Rouen has long been an art center, with artists passing through it on their way up and down the Seine, coming from Great Britain to the continent or from Paris on the way to the Normandy coast. Artists and tourists alike have been attracted to the cathedral's spectacular late flamboyant gothic style and Rouen's many other medieval monuments. It also happens to have France's strongest collection of Impressionist paintings outside of Paris.
