Bruno Delarue has just released a new book in which he examines the pictorial representation of Rouen in the 19th and early 20th centuries and redefines the Rouen school.
Posted on Sep 13, 20 at 3:08 p.m.
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Art historian, curator, former gallery owner, specialist in painting in Normandy, Bruno Delarue can’t stand what he reads today on Impressionism. He makes this known in a 64-page book published by Editions Terre en vue. Title: Rouen, pictorial moodss. Publisher installed in Fécamp for 15 years, he is well known to the public, booksellers and experts. Over the past years, he has written about fifty books on painters of the early 19th century.e century to today.
Read also: Normandy Impressionist Festival: visit the exhibitions in Rouen … from your smartphone
Tour de France of painting
In a decade, Bruno Delarue made his painting tour of France, stopping in the largest cities. He had not yet published anything on Rouen which many painters took as their motive. In his “pictorial moods”, one finds of course the romantic period with all the wave of the English watercolorists of the XIX.e : Bonington, Boys, Cotman, Turner, Roberts, Wild, Ruskin, Cox, Allow who have so well fixed on the canvas churches and old streets of the Norman capital. Other painters, French ones, will opt for the picturesque trend: Adolphe Hervier, Polycles Langlois, Louis Adeline, Emile Nicolle, Achille Bligny…
“The Rouennais Achille Bligny, recently rediscovered, will have a great interest in the architecture of his city,” notes Bruno Delarue. He was not only interested in great historical monuments. The precision of his drawings can bring him closer to topographic artists ”
Panoramic views
Bruno Delarue devotes several illustrated pages to panoramic views and to the work of Corot, Paul Huet, Charles-Marie Bouton in particular… “Rarely has the city been so represented in a panoramic way, and what is exceptional in Rouen, is all the more so because from these distant views will be born the greatest masterpieces which, curiously, give an impression of secret intimacy of the city that one does not find in the intramural views. “
Rouen school or not?
With his chapter on the Impressionists, Bruno Delarue tackles the second golden age of representations of Rouen. Unmissable: Claude Monet with his series of cathedrals which marks another milestone in the history of art and Camille Pissarro who completes his work. At the expense of Eugène Boudin, considers the author, confined for too long and who deserves a place worthy of his great talent, recalling that it was Boudin who, in Le Havre, revealed the real painting to the young Monet then a simple caricaturist. Special mention also for Charles Angrand, great among the great “who has shown a lucidity and a modernity which have not yet been really revealed”.
Bruno Delarue disputes the current classification of impressionist and post-impressionist painters, accuses the famous patron and collector François Depeaux of having put in the “School of Rouen” box painters who had nothing to do with it like Marcel Duchamp, the Norman who put a mustache on the Mona Lisa! Innumerable works that a too regionalist vision groups together unduly under the name “School of Rouen”.
Rouen, pictorial moods, a work that tries to keep and give everyone their rightful place in the currents that revolutionized painting at the turn of the 20th century.e century.
From our correspondent André Morelle
Practical information :
Bruno Delarue, Rouen, pictorial moods, Éditions Terre en Vue. Simultaneous release of Fécamp, pictorial moods.
Price: 18 euros.
Go out: discover, book –
