A fishing village turned Impressionist motif

A fashionable destination

If Dieppe was already enjoying an unprecedented tourist boom in the 1820s, thanks to the Duchesse de Berry who started the trend of sea bathing, other seaside resorts soon followed suit. The Pays de Caux saw the growth of more modest places such as Berneval, Pourville, Varengeville… and Les Petites-Dalles, the most secluded of them all.

It was the arrival of Elisabeth von Wittelsbach, Empress of Austria, better known as Sissi, which overturned the fate of Les Petites-Dalles in 1875, transforming it from a simple fishing village into a popular summer seaside resort!

There were many families from Rouen who would meet up in Les Petites-Dalles over the summer, forming different groups of visitors whose very diversity shaped the social fabric of this holiday spot. People from the political world rubbed shoulders with those from the spheres of literature and art. The famous journalist and Times correspondent Henri de Blowitz came to Les Petites-Dalles for the first time in 1881 and immediately succumbed to its charms. Similarly, numerous manufacturers form Rouen, such as Auguste Chiffray, Henri Wallon and Léon Monet, took up residence in Les Petites-Dalles during the summer.

A spirit of artistic competition by the seaside

Halfway between Saint-Valery-en-Caux and Fécamp, the village of Les Petites-Dalles enjoys an exceptional location. In a rocky indentation with very high cliffs rising sheer from the sea, the houses descend in terraces on the slopes of a narrow valley. At low tide, when the uneven stones of the bedrock are revealed, the view stretches from Dieppe in the North to Etretat in the South. Exposed to the strong sea winds, the site remains untamed.

Léon Monet, who lived in Maromme close to Rouen, first came to the village at the start of the 1870s. He had a little house built there on the hillside, where he used to invite his brother, the artist Claude Monet, to visit him. Entranced, Claude came back several times. All his landscape artist’s talent came to the fore in the wildness of this place, in the face of these towering chalk cliffs, and in the recreation of the grandeur around him; raw, imposing nature, contemplated and captured in his paintings.

Camille Pissarro, a loyal friend of Claude Monet, invited by Léon in 1883, also set up his easel looking out to sea. The authors Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Ernest Daudet (brother of Alphonse) stayed there for some time too and through their writing helped to build the reputation of the resort.

Eugène Delacroix visited Les Petites-Dalles in October 1849 and gives this account in his diary:

“Magnificent surroundings; (….) took a little narrow road to the sea: there it is at the very end of the path. Low tide.”

The natural, old-world charm of Les Petites-Dalles worked in turn on the painters Berthe Morisot, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, but also on Paul Valantin, Elie Nonclercq and Henri Bellery-Desfontaines.

So much so that the place became… a new Impressionist motif!