There are two specific reasons for visiting Normandy this year. First, it is 80 years since the Allies stormed ashore here on D-Day to set about the Germans. Second, it is 150 years since the impressionists – Monet, Dégas, Renoir, Pissarro and the rest – put a rocket under the French academic art world with their 1874 fringe exhibition in Paris. These young fellows outraged their predecessors by painting outside in order, as an art historian once told me, “to make atmosphere and instantaneity palpable”.
The vast majority of this artistic upheaval happened in Normandy. The…
