Activity Idea: Trouville, The Jetties, High Tide (Quick Tip)

Use the following strategies with Eugène Boudin’s Trouville, The Jetties, High Tide

Categories

List and categorize the objects and details you can find in Boudin’s Trouville, The Jetties, High Tide. Examples of categories include weather and nature, types of boats, or colors. Translate these words into French. Pick a few key words from your categories to write a brief description of the painting in French.

Your Own Impression

Practice working en plein air by going outside to sketch with oil pastels, paints, or another media that allows you to work quickly. Select one view and revisit it at the same time over the course of two or three days. Pay close attention to the weather conditions in your drawing, and record your written reflections in an artist’s journal. How did the appearance of your scene change over the course of one sketching session? How did it change over a few days? What has remained the same? How quickly would you need to work on a scene to capture an accurate impression of your view?

Travels in Normandy

Normandy has been a popular destination for tourists since the mid-19th century. Locate some current travel guides or information on Normandy or France on-line or in the library. Study the section on how to travel to and within the region. What modes of transportation would not have been available during Boudin’s lifetime? Has the role of boat travel, as seen in Trouville, The Jetties, High Tide, become more or less important? Using the information that you have found as a model, create travel instructions for a tourist visiting Normandy in 19th-century France. Use on-line or library research to find additional information about the history of different modes of transportation.

Compose It

Though artists like Boudin and Monet painted scenes observed from nature, they made deliberate choices about how to construct the composition of their paintings. Select an image from a magazine or your collection of photographs. What details of the picture could you change to make the composition have a different effect or meaning for the viewer? Potential changes could make the image more energetic, calming, impressionistic, or traditional. Scan the image and use digital software or create a drawing to change the composition of the image. How did you decide what to change? Which image do you find more visually compelling—the original or your version?