Impressions of Normandy

Caroline Mills goes walking in Normandy, discovering the landscapes that attracted Impressionist painters

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Tell me, having watched the 1980s blockbuster Fatal Attraction, would you step into a bathing hut named after the lead actress? Hmmm, not sure. There's some fun to be had, though, wandering along stylish Deauville's Promenade des Planches, passing the line of upmarket Art Deco bathing huts, each named after a film star, and contemplating the films they starred in. Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Sharon Stone and 200 others are here. Unless you've turned your back on the promenade to watch the ever-changing Normandy light race across the sky, just as Impressionist artists have.

Before movie stars and red carpet film festivals, 19th-century Deauville was renowned for attracting artists, enamoured by the shifting light while painting en plein air (outdoors). It seems an impossibility to capture such moments in one picture, for Normandy's light really does change within seconds.

Millet's inspiration

My tour began at Cap de la Hague, the northwest tip of the Cotentin Peninsula, where a pallid, grey sky hovered above a verdigris sea. A walk along the Sentier des Douaniers (customs officers' path) was in a wild, windswept sea-level landscape over which the Phare de Goury looks out.

To either side of the village of Goury is higher ground of tiny cattle-filled pastures, lined by hunched hedgerows that determine the prevailing weather. This wild countryside is the land of Jean-François Millet, a pre-Impressionist painter who found inspiration from the clifftops and fields around his birthplace, now a museum, in the hamlet of Gruchy to the east of Cap de la Hague.

I followed in his footsteps, on a three-mile coastal walk of epic views that takes in locations where he painted; 10 interpretation panels offer explanation along the route. One such painting, from the rocky Castel-Vendon viewpoint, is in the Musée Thomas Henry in Cherbourg.