Honfleur dans la brume

Honfleur, this small port on the Normandy coast, is almost the birthplace of Impressionism. About 50 years before this, painters like Boudin and the young Monet had come here to chase the shifting light over the water. Vallotton, a Swiss painter who had made his name in Paris with stark black-and-white prints, arrives at the same subject in 1911 and handles it in his own cool way. He climbed above the town, to the hill called Mont-Joli, looked down through the fog, then built the picture up later in the studio from sketches rather than painting on the spot. That is why the boats and rooftops come out as flat, still, simplified shapes, with the mist quietly swallowing the far shore.