Jacques-Émile Blanche, View of Dieppe from the cliffs

by Atelier Liesjes

From a height, the viewer looks down upon a town stretching across the plain in a long, grey strip. In the foreground lies a dry, yellow-green lawn with a sandy path; in the bottom left, the red roofs of a few houses disappear from view. On the right stands a large stone building with a dark slate roof and a garden wall, like a castle on the edge of the cliff. Visitors are seated in the grass: a woman in black wearing a straw hat, seen from behind; a woman in a striped dress holding a parasol that glows red on the inside; and, further away, a white parasol and a dark hat. Below, the town looms with red and blue-grey roofs, a church tower and a wide street leading down to the sea. A slender tower stands out against the rooftops. The sky takes up more than half the canvas: a vast, cream-coloured expanse with a single soft cloud and a narrow streak of sea-green on the horizon. Here, Blanche works with heavily diluted paint and loose, almost careless brushstrokes, transforming the town into a vibration rather than a structure. The atmosphere is that of a summer outing: sunny, windy and slightly melancholic, for man remains small beneath so much sky. The figures in the foreground are little more than blurs, but their leaning posture makes the height palpable. Jacques-Émile Blanche (Paris 1861 – Offranville 1942) knew the Normandy coast from his childhood and painted the cliffs near Dieppe and Offranville countless times. His work, influenced by Whistler and Manet, straddles the line between portraiture and landscape. The cliffs near Dieppe were a favourite subject of his, as were the bathers and the ships in the harbour. A spacious, airy panorama that lifts the spirit of a room.