In the footsteps of the impressionist painters…
Walking around Fresselines, on the side of the little confluence walk, you can put yourself in the footsteps of Claude Monet and stand at the exact spot where he planted his easel in 1889. You’ll then have a real painting of the Impressionist leader in front of you. “It really helps to understand what a landscape of this current was,” explains Christophe Rameix, he who ran as a kid in his same landscapes that he says he “love more than anything.”
That’s why twenty years ago, he threw himself into the adventure of writing a book on “the School of Crozant”An appellation that he defines simply as a group of people who painted the same places and at the same time. And precisely, towards the end of the nineteenth century, all landscape painters have passed one day by Crozant, as they did in Étretat. Beginning his research with seven or eight impressionists such as Guillaumin, Monet or even Léon Detroy, it took him five years to unroll a thread of more than 500 artists.
Why La Creuse
Why did La Creuse become one of the centers of interest for these painters? Becauseits reliefs, its colors, a very high horizon lent themselves completely to the ideal picture of an impressionist landscape, whose principle was to capture a fleeting moment.
These canvases were, moreover, usually painted in less than an hour with absolute respect for the motif, each branch and blade of grass exactly in its place at the moment it was captured by the artist’s brush. A transience that may have given the impression to the detractors of the time of an unfinished painting. With the keys to Impressionism in your pocket, you can then, at your leisure, go and admire the paintings in the artistic centers of Creuse but also in all the museums of the world.
