“Trouville, it’s my America” exhibition at the Villa Montebello Museum

“Trouville is my America”

The first half of the 19th century saw the development of the fashion for sea bathing on the Normandy coast. It all began in Dieppe, an important town with ancestral links to England (where this fashion originated). Then came Trouville.

Why Trouville? Why does the good fairy of sea bathing look at this small river port with almost no seafront? It is the artists who play a fundamental role in this story. The painters leave Paris, in search of the "picturesque", of a nature that is still wild and of populations with authentic ways of life (the opposite of the superficiality of Parisian relations).

From the 1820s, painters who arrived on the shore began to discover Trouville. Paul Huet, Richard Parkes Bonington, Eugène Isabey, Charles Mozin, Camille Corot came there, painted it, then exhibited their paintings at the Salons, the great Parisian exhibitions. This is how the name of Trouville became known and the first bathers came there in turn.

Writers are also there: Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert. Dumas père describes his arrival on the beach at Trouville and modestly compares himself to Christopher Columbus discovering the New World: "Trouville is my America."

The artists of this period bear witness to a Trouville that was still primitive, and then to rapid urbanization. Through a selection of paintings, original drawings, lithographs, and photographs—from public and private collections, some of which have never been seen before—the exhibition will retrace these times of transformation during which two villages (Trouville and Hennequeville) united to become the “Queen of the Beaches.”