Date: 02-06-1992
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999        
Subject:   19th Century      

IN 1817 it took John Sell Cotman 42 hours to make the crossing from Brighton to Dieppe. Having got over his travel sickness (this took another day or two) he proceeded to make some beautiful pencil and wash studies of Saint-Jacques Cathedral, of the castles of Dieppe and nearby Arques, that would later serve as illustrations to a book called The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy. It was a typical early nine-teenth-century project: Cotman was attracted to Dieppe, presumably, by his English Romantic taste for all things Gothic, for spandrels, flying buttresses, the subtle traceries of rose windows and quantities of crum-bling masonry. He is unlikely to have been aware of his part in establishing what John Willett, curator of Brighton City Museum's ''The Dieppe Connection'', refers to as ''the role of Dieppe as a meeting-point in the arts''.

Cotman's Saint-Jacques Facade, one of the first images you see in this beautiful and imaginative small exhibition, is a faded memento of the post-Napoleonic thaw in Anglo-French relations. For the long years of the Napoleonic wars, abroad had been inaccessible, inhospitable or just too plain dangerous to contemplate for the majority of English artists. But after 1815, the frontiers were down. Continental travel was, once again, possible. And it began, for most Englishmen and women, in Dieppe. Roughly midway between London and Paris, this small harbour town came to acquire a significance quite out of proportion to its size. It was the place where English insularity encountered its limits; the place where the familiar ended and the foreign began; the place where the limited horizons of home were broadened by the challenge of overseas.

By 1824, the crossing from Brighton to Dieppe had become considerably more pleasant than when Cotman used to make it. The first steam passage was made by the Rapid, which set out from the Chain Pier on 15 May of that year. Turner may have been on it. One of his main entries to the Royal Academy Annual Exhibition of 1825 was the enormous Dieppe Harbour (now in the Frick Collection in New York). It was, among other things, a declaration of supreme self-confidence on Turner's part: the transformation of a mun-dane, modern harbour scene into a fantastical, poetically elevated study of the effects of sunlight on water; and a pointer, too - this radiant essay in Claudian seascape - to the fact that he already considered himself more at home within the grand tradition of French painting than most contemporary French painters. Dieppe Harbour is necessarily absent from ''The Dieppe Connection'' (the Frick does not lend), so in its place you get to admire another, later example of the artist's flair for transformation and aggrandisement: a watercolour of The Chateau d'Arques, near Dieppe, which turns what had become a fairly squat and unimpressive medieval relic into an enchanted castle backlit by an empyrean sunset.

The boats ran to and fro between Dieppe and Brighton (and, later, Newhaven) but the cultural traffic flowed mostly one way. Dieppe was always more of a first stop for the English on their way to France and the rest of mainland Europe than vice versa. It was where minor English talents like Charles Conder learned to paint almost like real Impressionists. Conder, like Manet and Degas, learned to appreciate the randomness and flux of life on the beaches and promenades, incorporating the chance configurations of humanity found there into canvases composed with artful artlessness: this was English painting constructed according to French prototypes.

Dieppe, too, was where Ben Nicholson, in the late 1920s, experimented with the effects of collage and the painterly ruggedness that he admired in the Cubists, especially Braque. His Bocque is both a homage to the memory of childhood holidays spent in Dieppe (his father, William Nicholson, used to take the family there) and an attempt to break out of his Englishness and become Internationally Modern. The rectangle of the canvas stands in for a shop window, an image of images broken and merged by reflection and therefore as good a pretext as any for an essay in quasi-Cubism. Nearby, Braque's 1932 Dieppe Beach, a magnifi-cently rough painting of boats on a pebble-dash shore, shows the Nicholson up. But the juxtaposition also suggests how productive French examples could be for English art: Nicholson's four or five years as a genuinely major artist, which began a few years after Bocque, would have been inconceivable without his knowledge of Braque and the other major School of Paris painters of the time.

But ''The Dieppe Connection'' also manages to suggest the extent to which artistic influence between England and France in the nineteenth and (to a lesser extent) the early twentieth centuries travelled in both directions. To see Pissarro's Pointillist-Impressionist paintings of Dieppe in the 1870s close to the Turner watercolour, or to compare the Turner with Monet's lurid, heat-struck Varengeville Church at Dusk - which looks rather like a Claude that has been melted - is to realise how much the Impressionists owed to Turner's tremendous reinvention of landscape as a genre. Likewise, to see Richard Parkes Bonington's Pays de Caux: Twilight of 1823 close to Delacroix's much later Harbour of Dieppe - both fantastically fresh oil sketches after nature - is to realise how thoroughly many French nineteenth-century artists would be in-debted to English examples. The ambition to translate the delicate, almost fugitive effects of watercolour into oil-painting, so manifest in Bonington's art, would have far-reaching consequences for later French art.

John Willett contends that to survey the art produced in and around Dieppe during the years covered by this show (roughly 1815-1939) is to see ''a microcosm of the modern age''. This is almost convincing.

Some elements of the Dieppe microcosm are less impressive than others, but it is surprising to learn just how many major artists worked there down the years. Aubrey Beardsley visited there briefly, long enough to produce a wonderfully unsettling image of three women standing by the sea, dressed in extrava-gant, fetishistic versions of bathing gear.

Whistler came to Dieppe too, and painted much as usual: he thickened the bracing sea air to an art-for-art's-sake fog, painting shop-fronts and sea-front alike through heavy mists and vapours. Gauguin also spent some time in Dieppe, although the only evidence of that in this show, his 1885 Harbour Scene, Dieppe, is a saccharine pinkish mess of a seascape which may well have been the sort of thing that prompted Walter Sickert to tell Gauguin he should have stayed a bank clerk: famously bad advice, but it may not have seemed so daft at the time.

The dozen or so Sickerts in the exhibition do much to confirm his friend Jacques-Emile Blanche's opinion that: ''Whether he willed it or by chance, in spite of himself he was the painter of Dieppe. No other artist has so perfectly explained the character of the town, whose Canaletto he has become.'' What Sickert saw in Dieppe was, above all, its melancholy. He painted what may be the sadness fundamental to all harbour towns, which are places of transit, of temporary residency. Sickert's Dieppe is generally deserted and sus-pended in a perpetual, wistful twilight whose effect is profoundly alienating. When he painted Les Arcades de la Poissonerie, he turned nothing much - a row of ordinary buildings lit by a purple dusk - into a grand, sombre image whose effects are hard to square with the mundanity of its subject matter.

The painting's theme is, perhaps, the world's indifference to those who inhabit it, Dieppe a pretext for far more than a simple topographical record: these stately-seedy rust-coloured buildings with their empty arcades below and their irregular turreting of attic windows above, this unpeopled street, are painted with a subtle weightiness that creates a powerful sense of foreboding. De Chirico's empty Italian plazas and ar-cades might be more overtly enigmatic but convey no stronger sense of the mystery and even terror of the world. Even when painting such a straightforward scene as Bathers, Dieppe, Sickert managed to suggest, not the sunniness of bathing pursuits, but some kind of weird existential encounter: wearing their striped costumes, the bathers wade into the grey-green spume.

In this and other paintings of Dieppe - particularly his paintings of the Hotel Royal and the sea-front be-fore it, the odd passer-by painted blurrily as in a photograph exposed for too long - Sickert developed a new style. This is Impressionism raised to a pitch of tragic feeling foreign to the majority of its French practitioners. You could call it Depressionism. Arthur Symonds captured something of its flavour in a short poem dedicated to Sickert: ''Indefinitely desolate; / A sea of lead, a sky of slate . . . The long hotel, acutely white, / Against the after-sunset light, / Withers grey-green . . . '' Not great poetry, perhaps, but it contains the seeds of a truth. Sickert was the only painter to find in Dieppe more than a temporary resort for the practice of his art. He turned the place into an image of his preoccupations. He remade Dieppe as art.