Fisherman's Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, born in Toulouse in 1750, was one of many French artists who went to Italy. These artists wanted to study the works of Renaissance masters and to absorb the flavor of the countryside around Rome that had inspired the great seventeenth-century French painters resident there, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Valenciennes went to Italy...

The same forces that transformed the suburbs of Paris were also at work along the English Channel. Vacationers, ostensibly seeking nature, poured into fishing villages and larger ports in such numbers that traditional life there was forever altered. “Bathing” along the Channel meant the encounter of two peoples, both undergoing fateful changes: the...