Renoir loved La Maison Fournaise. Thirty-three of his paintings show portraits of the Fournaise family or festive dining scenes in the house. Luncheon of the Boating Party, painted between 1880 and 1881, included some of his closest friends, among them Aline Charigot, a dressmaker who became his model and then his wife; Charles Ephrussi, an art critic and collector; and Gustave Caillebotte, the wealthy painter.
In 1923 Duncan Phillips, an American art collector, paid $125,000 for Luncheon of the Boating Party, calling it “one of the greatest paintings in the world.” It is the most important work in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where it hangs. Parisian popular culture has not forgotten it. It figured in the 2001 film Amélie, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s love letter to a sweet, imaginary Paris. In the film, the lonely, mischievous Amélie befriends her neighbor, an older, fragile artist with a delicate countenance who never leaves his apartment. He is so obsessed with Luncheon of the Boating Party that he paints it again and again, struggling to capture the inscrutable expression of a single character.
Inside the restaurant, a reproduction of Luncheon hangs in the main dining room. If you sit on the balcony and ignore the modern buildings on the other side of the river, you can imagine that you are near the spot where Renoir and his friends lunched, talked and laughed together on those distant Sunday afternoons that never seemed to end.
CAMILLE PISSARRO CALLED ROUEN “the most splendid landscape a painter could ever dream of” and painting is still crucial to life in the city. Every summer, Rouen celebrates its commitment to its artistic legacy with a speed-painting contest. The city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, one of the finest art museums in France, displays the winning work for a year.
One year, thirty professional and amateur painters lined up at seven in the morning at the Pompon-Rouge, a gray, white, and red barge transformed into a small art museum on the quay. They received blank canvases and were allowed to choose their own medium and style, as long as they painted a subject that evoked the Seine.
The artists staked out their territory along the river, with the bell towers of Rouen’s churches on the Right Bank and tall industrial structures on the Left. Impressionism is all about painting quickly. The colors of the river and the sky in Normandy change with the sun, the mists, and the rain. Clouds and wind shift without warning. The skies were overcast and deep gray for much of the day. But the painters soldiered on.
The styles were as varied as the painters themselves. Some took inspiration from the Impressionists. One artist painted a chiaroscuro oil of the two yellow industrial cranes situated on the far side of the river, another a watercolor of grain silos shining silver despite the fickle sunlight that day, a third an orange-and-violet sunset with buildings in deep purple silhouette. The youngest participant, a nine-year-old girl, painted herself in a sailboat, an enormous yellow sun shining high in the sky, her hair blowing in the wind. Nearly fifty other adults and children contributed individual panels to a long group fresco that would be exhibited in Rouen’s city hall. All made the 5 p.m. deadline, and their works were hung on the walls of the Pompon-Rouge.
“We had a great adventure of sharing today,” Marie-Hélène Joyen-Conseil, an art therapist and painter, announced to the crowd gathered inside. “To produce a painting in ten hours, it was a challenge. Well done, given the gray skies.”
The first-place winner was Michel Abdou, a seventy-two-year-old retired commercial artist. His painting, made in large brushstrokes in acrylics, showed the Pompon-Rouge parked on a peach-hued boardwalk flanked by trees. The barge seemed tiny next to a huge ship docked in the Seine. A couple strolled along a walkway, and a young man sat on a square boulder fixed in the water. In the 1970s, while working his day job, Abdou studied painting at night at the Le Crayon, Rouen’s École des Beaux-Arts. He moved into decorative painting and, in 1992, full-time into figurative painting. He lamented the decline of interest in the art and craft of painting. “People today are saturated with images that come to them,” he told me. “They are suffocated with television, the Internet, their iPhones. They forget that they can achieve things with their hands. They forget that painting is an art that has to be learned.”
There was a lot of talk among the painters that day about the magic and lure of light. Some saw the play of sunlight on water and felt the urge to rush out and capture it on canvas. Some played cat and mouse with the light, watching as the deep gray sky turned clear blue and then, without warning, darkened again as mischievous white clouds blocked the sun. Some were entranced by the currents and colors of the water that shifted with the time of day.
“In Normandy, we must throw ourselves into our canvases to translate the essence of our emotions—before the sky changes!” said Joyen-Conseil. “The Seine has inspired us with its waves, its rumblings, its bridges, its tugs, its barges, its cranes. It waters our fields, our apple trees, cherry trees, whose flowering lights up our canvases. It’s the lifeblood of our region.”
A skeleton of a miniature model of La Dauphine, the boat that Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed from Rouen to New York in 1524. ANDREW PLUMP.
TWENTY-FOUR
The Port That Rivaled Paris
The horizon was defined by the
curve of the river. It was flat as a
mirror, with great insects skating on the
tranquil water.
—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT,
Sentimental Education
It was the most exciting meal of
my life.
—JULIA CHILD, describing her lunch of
raw oysters, sole meunière, a green salad with
vinaigrette dressing, a Pouilly-Fumé wine, and
fromage blanc at La Couronne in Rouen
THE SEINE CHANGES DRAMATICALLY at Rouen, emerging from one of its exaggerated loops deeper and wider—big enough, for the first time on its trip to the sea, to accommodate ocean-going ships. Traditionally, that made Rouen the port where goods were shipped on their way eastward toward Paris or westward toward international markets. Passengers made the same transfer. For nineteenth-century American visitors seeing France for the first time, Rouen was a necessary stop on the way to Paris. In fact, it is only when you come to Rouen that you understand that Paris was not always the star of the Seine’s commercial universe. Until the nineteenth century, Rouen was considered France’s most important port, and even today, it is the number one port for cereal exports in Europe.
The Seine in Rouen spans three and a half miles. It begins at the eastern edge of the city at the tip of the Île Lacroix, the Seine’s final island en route to the sea. It ends in the west amid three major shipping basins that receive both barges and container ships into and out of the city. The ships that come here keep getting bigger, which means that the riverbed must be continually dredged, deepened, and flattened to accommodate them. Rouen is also an increasingly popular cruise ship terminal not only because it is the closest ocean cruise port to Paris but also because of its proximity to port cities like London and Amsterdam. Rouen recovered from the destruction of World War II to become a sprawling industrial city. But its historic center remains intact, its timber-fronted houses and narrow cobbled streets lovingly preserved and restored. Visitors here step into a setting of Rouen’s medieval heyday, when cargo ships arrived under sails to crowd the harbor and merchants in velvets and silks met on the quays. This was also the Rouen where the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine after her execution in the city’s main square.
You cannot escape Joan of Arc in Rouen. The image of the cross-dressing teenage martyr who fought the English occupiers and helped restore the French throne six centuries ago pervades the port city. Her story, wrapped in myths, lives on. A fearless warrior, a free spirit, a great patriot, she still is considered by many French citizens (especially far-right politicians) to be the incarnation of France itself.
I first learned about Joan far away from the Seine, at Holy Angels Elementary School in Buffalo. She was one of the nuns’ favorite martyrs, a
nd they told the story of her life and her horrific death in Rouen in excruciating detail. The nuns taught us that we, too, could aspire to be martyred for the faith and go straight to heaven.
An illiterate girl from the country, Joan claimed to hear voices from heaven that ordered her to restore the French dauphin to his throne. She led a siege against the English at Orléans and paved the way for him to be crowned King Charles VII at Reims. After a string of military defeats, she was captured by Burgundians and ransomed off to the English. She was imprisoned and put on trial in Rouen in 1431 for a series of crimes, including witchcraft, dressing like a man, and heresy. She was convicted, sentenced to death, tied to a stake in the place du Vieux Marché, the central market square, and set on fire. She was nineteen.
To prevent a cult of martyrdom, Joan’s judges were determined to leave no trace of her body. The executioner scooped her ashes from the foot of the pyre into sacks and poured them from a bridge into the Seine. According to some versions of this story, her heart refused to burn, so it was dumped, along with her ashes, into the river.
A stone plaque in Rouen that marks the approximate place where Joan of Arc’s ashes are claimed to have been thrown into the Seine after she was burned at the stake. IRIS SAMUELS.
Many historians believe that Joan’s ashes were thrown from the bridge that was then called Pont Mathilde, now Pont Boieldieu, in the center of Rouen. A color engraving by artist-writer Émile Deshays in his 1911 book about Joan captured the kinetic scene. Two men in red cast the ashes off the bridge as a small crowd gathers behind them. The ashes fly out of their sacks and form a thick, dark cloud in a bright, peach-colored sky. Today, a humble stone plaque marks the spot. “Near here on Wednesday, May 30, 1431, after torture at the Old Market, the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown from the top of the old Pont Mathilde,” it reads.
Every city, town, and church of any worth in France has a statue or painting dedicated to Joan, but Rouen celebrates her memory with more enthusiasm than most. She has given her name to a street, a square, a café, a restaurant, a cocktail, a market stall, a bridge, a parking lot, a real estate agency, a hotel, and a wine cave. Her image graces labels for French mineral water, liqueur, and cheese. Boutiques sell les larmes de Jeanne d’Arc—Joan of Arc’s tears—a rich confection of grilled almonds covered with crispy nougat and chocolate and rolled in unsweetened cocoa.
A walk through the old city center of Rouen takes visitors past various monuments and landmarks evoking Joan, including the Tower of Joan of Arc where soldiers may have threatened her with torture, and the modern Joan of Arc Church, built in 1979. Then there is the Historial Jeanne d’Arc, a multimedia space opened in 2015 that is part theatre, part museum. Created in the fifteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace, where Joan was tried in 1431, the Historial projects 3-D film dramatizations of Joan’s life onto the pale stone walls, including testimony from accusers at her trial and a wall of fierce, crackling orange flames that carried her to her death.
IN THE LONG HISTORY of Rouen, Joan can seem recent. Romans settled in Rouen in antiquity, as they did in Paris, drawn by its natural harbor in a bend in the river. The city’s Musée des Antiquités, housed in a former convent, displays Roman-era objects found throughout Normandy. The highlight is a room devoted to a mosaic taken from the dining room floor of a third-or fourth-century villa, discovered in a garden in Lillebonne, west of Rouen, in 1870. The mosaic, approximately nineteen by nineteen feet in size, was broken into pieces, sold and resold, restored both badly and beautifully over the years, and, in the end, preserved for posterity. It depicts a stag hunt in a wooded landscape evoking the Norman forest, a sacrifice to the goddess Diana, and a circular central panel showing a lustful young man pursuing a woman, naked except for a veil draped over the tops of her legs. Was she a nymph? Was he the god Apollo? Would she escape?
IN THE NINTH CENTURY, the Vikings sailed up the Seine to invade and plunder. Its wide estuary, slow current, and ready access to the North Sea and the English Channel made it an easy pathway inland. After decades of war and destruction, in 911, King Charles the Simple of France capitulated. He exchanged the land that is now Normandy and his daughter’s hand in marriage to the Viking chief Rollo for peace and protection. Rollo became the first Duke of Normandy, settled in, and made Rouen his capital. The Vikings assimilated into the local population and converted to Christianity.
William the Conqueror, Rollo’s direct descendant, is best known in history as the Norman military leader who amassed a flotilla of boats and conquered England in 1066. He was also an able ruler of Normandy who built close ties with the church and traveled extensively around his region, collecting taxes, administering charters, and holding court in Rouen. More than a century later, in 1189, one of his descendants, Richard the Lionheart, would be invested as Duke of Normandy at Château Gaillard, the fortress he built high on a hill in Normandy. (Richard was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey later that year.) In the 1400s, their descendants still laid claim to Normandy and had expanded English control over territory in France, including Paris during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). It was in resisting them that Joan of Arc played her heroic role.
Joan’s story played out in the shadow of Rouen’s cathedral, the same one that inspired Emma Willard, the nineteenth-century American educator, to write that when she saw it, her “mind was smitten with a feeling of sublimity almost too intense for mortality.” More than double the size of Notre-Dame, it can still overpower first-time visitors with its grace and grandeur. Its latticed cast-iron spire, the tallest in France, punctures the skyline.
When Monet visited Rouen in the 1890s, the cathedral unsettled him. “I had a night filled with nightmares: the cathedral was falling down on me, it appeared either blue, pink, or yellow,” he wrote. He planted himself in the square facing its western façade, compelled by some feverish devotion to paint it over and over. The façade alone mesmerized him; he never set foot inside.
Monet had learned all about the movement of light by painting the Seine, but the Rouen Cathedral challenged him anew. The light changed so often that at one point he was working on fourteen canvases simultaneously; by the end of his project, he had painted the cathedral façade more than thirty times. “What Monet painted was not the cathedral, but the light bouncing off the cathedral,” wrote art historian and Monet specialist Douglas Skeggs.
Proust appreciated Monet’s genius. In his most famous work, In Search of Lost Time, he fantasized about whether a writer could achieve what Monet had done with his paintings of the cathedral of Rouen and the waterlilies of Giverny. “Imagine today a writer to whom the idea would occur to treat twenty times under different lights the same theme, and who would have the sensation of creating something profound, subtle, powerful, overwhelming, original, startling like the fifty cathedrals or forty water-lily ponds of Monet,” he wrote. But in an unfinished essay published after his death, Proust suggested that after experiencing the beauty of physical sites through Monet’s eye, the reality of visiting them may disappoint. “It is of the ideal that we are enamored,” he wrote.
IN THE AFTERMATH of World War II, the port in Rouen revived its commercial and industrial activities, rendering the river largely inaccessible to the public. Then, in the late 1980s, Rouen launched a sweeping urban-renewal plan that continues today, razing decrepit warehouses along the Right Bank and later creating pedestrian walkways and bicycle paths. The main walkway in Rouen is wider than those along the Seine in Paris, and it is largely uninterrupted by bridges or stairs. Though not as scenic as the gilded paths in Paris, this longer, straighter river walk gives joggers and bikers more freedom. Restaurants, tourist boats, a health club, and a maritime museum line the waterfront. People picnic on the banks of the Seine and on the Île Lacroix. The tourist site Panorama XXL features a giant rotunda with huge circular 3-D paintings of Rouen in Joan of Arc’s day. The historic center of the city boasts new boutique hotels, including one named the Gustave Flaubert Literary Hotel.
A neighborhood and a bridge are named after Flaubert. The ten-room Flaubert museum holds the room where he was born and the small hospital where his father worked as a surgeon. His grave can be visited, along with that of artist Marcel Duchamp, in the Cimetière Monumental de Rouen.
Despite his dislike for Rouen, Flaubert drew strength from the Seine. From 1844, when he was in his early twenties, until his death when he was fifty-eight, he lived with his mother and his niece in a large eighteenth-century country house at Croisset, four miles outside Rouen. He wrote his major novels in a ground-floor study overlooking the river. At night he would walk from the house along a towpath bordered with linden trees on the riverbanks, a spot he called his gueuloir (shouting parlor). A perfectionist of style, he loudly recited the passages he had written to judge their musicality. The house has been torn down; the only remnant is a garden pavilion that has been turned into a small museum with some of his personal possessions, including an armchair, an inkwell, goose quills, a writing case, photographs, and portraits.
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