Granville Museums: 2025 exhibitions

Benefiting from the boom in landscape painting, Normandy captivated painters during the 19th century. Picturesque and easy to reach from the artistic centres of London and Paris, it had many qualities that attracted landscape painters. When their tour of Normandy took them through Granville, the artists multiplied their representations. Annual submissions to the Salon des artistes français, the official heart of the artistic circus à Paris, testify to a continuous representation of Granville throughout the 19th century. Scenes of local life, representations of the cliffs, the Chausey islands, the port and its activities were among their favourite subjects.

Sailors from Granville were among the first to embark on the adventure of the Grande Pêche off the coast of Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, now Canadian territory, where fish were plentiful. Until then a small coastal town, Granville was one of France’s leading fishing ports for cod, alongside Saint-Malo, Dunkirk and Fécamp from the 16th to the 20th century. From 1564, a charter mentions this activity as regular in the Normandy port. Each year, the Newfoundlanders set sail for the banks for a period of six to eight months, from late winter to autumn. Recruited from the coast and the hinterland, the crews are made up of around thirty men, known as terre-neuvas, from the captain to the cabin boy, including the salter and the cook.

Somewhat removed from its prestigious Breton neighbour, Granville has been just as successful as Saint-Malo in making its port a naval stronghold, both in times of peace and war. From the 16th century onwards, the people of Granville have been arming mooring vessels for Newfoundland. A few large families such as the Couraye du Parc, Hugon, Lévesque and Leboucher families were particularly prominent. In times of war, they armed their ships for racing: with the authorisation of the King, the sailors set off to board enemy navies, whether civilian or military. Granville boasted the extraordinary careers of Beaubriand-Lévesque (1666-1706) and Pléville le Pelley (1726-1805), until the racing war gradually disappeared with the First Empire, between 1815 and 1820.

Since the end of the 18th century, following the English example, medicine has extolled the virtues of seaside bathing and the coastal climate. The French côtes were transformed to welcome city dwellers for spa treatments and then pleasure resorts. Even before the opening of the first wooden saloon for bathers in 1828, which was extended in 1858, Granville was a popular balneacute;aire resort. The arrival of the direct train from Paris in 1870 stimulated its development. The first beach cabins appeared, initially towed out to sea to prevent women from showing up in swimming costumes. Gradually, the cabins became fixed and the Plat Gousset promenade was improved from 1859 onwards. The beach became a shared space, regulated by the sea bathing policies dictated by local politicians, while the casino developed its entertainment to entertain the first tourists.

Like many harbour towns, Granville has opened up to the world and increased its exchanges with other places. Pioneers, privateers, shipowners, soldiers or officers, the marins from Granville have sailed the seas of the globe and brought back memories as rich as they are varied;These were used to adorn the curiosity cabinets that were in vogue from the Renaissance to the 19th century (naturalized animals, shells, objets d’art, weapons, etc.). Each of the five continents is represented in the collections of the Musée d’art et d’histoire, among which it is not surprising to see a Kanak whalebreaker with a sperm whale tooth, an 18th-century Venetian spyglass or scarab beetles from the Congo. Marked by the orientalism in vogue in the 19th and early 20th centuries, local painters Maurice Orange, Pierre Brette, Henri Rudaux, Jacques Simon and others travelled to North Africa and depicted its inhabitants, landscapes and monuments in their paintings and drawings.

North Africa is a land of many cultures.

The Chausey archipelago, located 16km off the coast of Granville, is bathed in some of the highest tides in Europe. The tides have sculpted a unique landscape, giving rise to 52 high tides and 365 low tides;There are 365 high and low marshes, whose rocks and lots bear the poetic names of l’Eléphant, les Moines or la Chimère. The particularly rich fauna and flora of Chausey have been protected since 2004 by the Zone Natura 2000 classification. The archipelago has been occupied by man since prehistoric times: a cromlech and menhirs still bear witness to this. Chausey does not appear in texts until the 11th century, when Richard II, Duke of Normandy, gave the islands to the monks of Mount Saint-Michel. The history of the archipelago, a strategic location for the conquest of Normandy and Brittany, was shaped by conflicts between the French and English until the 19th century. Its official attachment in 1802 to the town of Granville put an end to territorial claims.