In Montreuil with my wife last year, l was interested to see that the local council had placed information plaques around their beautiful town. The plaques commemorate American artists from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries who had spent time there, painting pleasant scenes in the impressionist manner they had learnt either at the Academies in Paris or in studies at the Slade. I was a little miffed that it was only American artists represented; I expect an American charity had paid for the plaques, but surely some English painters visited, or was the invasion of English aesthetes confined to recent years? Certainly the town seemed to echo with English voices discussing the extraordinary elegance of the place.
There was something familiar about the paintings reproduced on the plaques. They reminded me of work by British artists of the same era, things I have seen reproduced in monographs to illustrate development of style from the stiff and over-fussy Victorian academic manner, through Impressionism, and eventually to a Post-Impressionist realisation. Work by people such as Robert Bevan.
There is a reason for this resemblance. In that period, France held absolute sway over Western visual culture. It was de rigeur for anyone with pretensions to the avant-garde to spend formative time in Paris, followed by more time wandering in the north, west and south of the country, painting the local scene and the local people. Impressionism was the new thing: standing in a field with an easel and a palette, recording the view, was what the new artist did. Paintings of things previously confined to the background or to genre paintings were composed with great seriousness, tonal and colour values sought out and nursed into works that redefined what was thought of as beautiful.