Context brings the brightest minds to your living room with perspective-shifting online lectures.
French Impressionists: Painting the Seaside of Normandy with Dr. Alison Bracker
No events are scheduled at this time. Want to be notified when it’s back? Click the blue button to the right and we’ll notify you.
The opening of train lines from Paris to France's northern coastal villages from the late 1840s to the 1860s gave rise to seaside vacations along the Channel. Fashionable Parisians, including Emperor Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie, frequented seaside resorts to bathe in the therapeutic saltwater, turning them into "the summer boulevard of Paris." Accordingly, many French painters moved away from depicting stormy maritime scenes, fishermen, and local peasant women to capturing the new breed of bathers flocking to the healing waters of such places as Trouville, Sainte-Adresse, Argenteuil, Berck, and Étretat.
Led by Dr. Alison Bracker, an expert on modern and contemporary art history, this lecture takes us back to 19th-century coastal Normandy to see how the Impressionists perceived its transformation over the decades. Designed to inform curiosity and future travels, participants will come away with an increased understanding of tourism's rise along the Channel coast and what the Impressionists gained from painting burgeoning seaside resorts and their fashionable visitors.
Dr. Alison Bracker is an independent art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is an expert in the conservation of unusual materials in contemporary art and co-editor of Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas, and Uncomfortable Truths (Elsevier, 2009), praised as "one of the most significant books in the field of heritage conservation." Alison held a six-year post-Doctoral fellowship at the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum before taking over the Royal Academy of Arts' Events and Lectures Program, which she ran for eight years. She continues to lecture and publish on modern and contemporary art and artists, including Hugo Wilson, Lenz Geerk, Ai Weiwei, Anselm Kiefer, Édouard Manet, and David Hockney. After a childhood in Los Angeles and 25 years in England, Alison moved to Nice, France, where she now lives and works.
This conversation is suitable for all ages.
60 minutes
Never miss a chance to listen in on a lecture given by Dr. Alison Bracker. She presents everything with such distinctive style. You come away from a class with her feeling knowledgeable and passionate about a subject that was only of passing interest. This particular lecture tells a lesser-known impressionists (in addition to the famous Renoir) and the intersection of geography, history, and art. Spectacular.
Guest did not leave comment
Alison was superb ! Her presentation was thoughtful, informational and beautifully illustrated