Exploring Guernsey through the eyes and art of Renoir

Bathers were silhouetted against jagged rocks, mottled and striped in browns, yellows, reds and greens, jutting from a sea of intense turquoise... or azure... or…

Each time I looked at the beautiful Moulin Huet Bay, something changed as the light continually shifted. No wonder French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir favoured this spot for painting when he spent five weeks in Guernsey from September to early October 1883, a trip that helped lift a period of self-doubt and provided the artist with fresh inspiration.  

For the 140^th anniversary of his artistically productive visit, some of the 15 works Renoir is known to have made in Guernsey have been brought back to the island. It was an opportunity to see the famous artist’s pictures alongside the places they depict and the island attractions their creator enjoyed, many of which – from sea swimming and sightseeing to scenic walking and epicurean eating – are still very much on offer.

I walked through attractive Candie Gardens gently sloping up from Guernsey’s capital, St Peter Port, with views over its harbour, castle and neighbouring islands of Herm and Sark (both also part of the Bailliwick of Guernsey, ruled by the same 800-year-old parliament) to Guernsey Museum. Here I found the exhibition. Renoir in Guernsey included ten original Renoirs – quite a coup for a 24-square-mile (62sqkm) island with fewer than 64,000 people. One small work is owned by the museum and one was recently purchased by a syndicate led by NGO Art for Guernsey, but Head of Heritage Services, Helen Glencross, admits she had to pinch herself “when a van arrived loaded with more than £40 million worth of art”.  

Half the pictures were of Moulin Huet (pronounced ‘Moulin Wet’ in Guernsey) – which even in the 1880s featured in French and English guidebooks aimed at the new steamship tourists to the Channel Islands. Griggs Guide described it as a “famous resort for artists, many of whom have committed to canvas the ever-changing aspects its locality presents”. Resort is pushing it a bit; there are still hardly any buildings here, but the attraction to artists was – and is – undoubted.   

Renoir himself said, “I like a painting that makes me want to stroll in it”, so having enjoyed his pictures on the gallery wall, I headed out to stroll in them. At Moulin Huet, I followed Art for Guernsey’s Renoir Walk to five spots where the artist painted. Picture frames, similar in style to those Renoir chose for his paintings, marked the viewpoints – the first in the little car park above the bay, the fifth high on the cliff path with panoramic views and an open invitation to walk right along the island’s scenic south coast.

The second frame was missing. It wasn’t vandalised; there is very little crime in Guernsey. It just suffered in the salty air and will soon be replaced. Its position is in the garden of the delightful new Renoir Tea Garden serving Renoir Tea amongst other specially-made blends, cakes, salads and sandwiches (including local crab) amid wonderful vistas of the bay.

There was a tearoom in Renoir’s time too, and the scene he painted from here – Brouillard à Guernesey (Mist in Guernsey), on loan to the exhibition all the way from America – is little changed. The cottage in the picture’s foreground still stands on the rock next to the tearoom. Currently under renovation, it has just regained its Renoir-depicted red roof. But the cottage is not the star of the painting, or of the live scene. That honour goes to the rocks and water beyond, where sunlight plays over the surfaces, making them dance with multicoloured light.

Several of Renoirs other pictures of Moulin Huet include bathers and the artist was entranced by his observations of Guernsey’s liberal attitude to seaside leisure – a far cry from the bathing machines and heavily-clothed single-sex swimming prevalent in mainland England and France. “You cannot imagine how pretty it all looks,” he wrote to his Paris art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, “with women and men lying together on the rocks”. He even witnessed nude bathing which he connected with the classical nudes he had recently seen on a trip to Italy, leading to a series of paintings he made later that year of modern but idealised naked female bathers in realistic landscapes.

The bay is still a favourite swimming spot and as I descended to the sandy beach the water looked irresistible. I was bemoaning my lack of a swimsuit or towel when the mother of a family just getting dressed by the rocks, offered to lend me hers. She’s a painter who has just moved to Guernsey, and was clearly going to fit in on this island that prides itself on its friendliness. I accepted her offer, and plunged into the cool, clear sea to swim – just as I had strolled – in Renoir’s art.

Wild swimming is a bit of an obsession in Guernsey. Even in 1883 the British Medical Journal was extolling its virtues for physical and mental health, and I met islanders from all walks of life who dip daily whatever the weather. Some swim in open sea, others at the recently renovated La Vallette Bathing Pools in St Peter Port. Opened in 1865 – and visited by Renoir – they fill at high tide, becoming contained stone lidos at low. I arrived to find them invisible beneath a slightly choppy sea. I hesitated, but thanks to a helping hand from another friendly islander, I swam safely and enchantedly, with the thirteenth-century castle silhouetted against the morning sun and sailing dinghies parading across the skyline.   

I should have known the tide would be high. Guernsey has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world and the evening before, I had joined locals gathered on the seafront for a ‘mega-tide’ of 10.2m. Islanders in bare feet or wellies splashed joyously along the seafront as water spilled from the marina towards the waterfront bars and restaurants. Here are served the products of that sea, delectable fresh seafood from bass and bream to oysters and lobster, along with creamy dairy products from special-breed Guernsey cows, and, as Renoir noted, “steak and ale at manageable prices”.

In Renoir’s time, Guernsey was best known in France not for its scenery, its swimming, its historic sites or its culinary delights, but as the 15-year home-in-exile of their most famous writer, Victor Hugo. Renoir wrote to his friend and patron Paul Berard: “We waited impatiently for the boat that would take us to see the rock on which the great poet languished.”

Hugo completed some of his most famous works on Guernsey including Les Miserables and the locally-set Les Travailleurs de la mer (Toilers of the Sea). Hugo was back in France by the time Renoir came to the island, but the ‘great poet’s’ house stood just a few hundred metres from Renoir’s lodgings in St Peter Port and was opened weekly to the public so Renoir must surely have visited. I followed suit – and found it a bizarre experience. 

Hauteville House is decorated across every inch to Hugo’s strict specifications, and he regarded it as a work of art as important as his books. Stuffed with extraordinary craftwork from church-style carvings to Chinoiserie, Guernsey-Delft tiles to 18^th-century tapestries, it is astonishing, dramatic – and deeply narcissistic. Most of a floor is given over to a death room for the writer, complete with an oversized desk used only to compose his will, and an elaborate four-poster bed that was never slept in. Hugo’s wife and adult children moved out and Hugo lived alone tucked away in the low-ceilinged loft with stunning views over the harbour, castle and, on a clear day, the coast of his French homeland.  

Hugo’s house is not to be missed, but I was almost relieved to leave and wander in fresh sea air down to Castle Cornet, repository of 800 years of the island’s history. The oldest part was built in 1204 when Guernsey chose to remain under the English crown (rather than the French). The island had been connected to England since 1066 when, as islanders like to put it, “We conquered England alongside William the Norman”.  The British monarch remains Guernsey’s head of state but is not called the King or Queen here, but The Duke of Normandy.

Renoir may well have first disembarked on Guernsey in the shadow of this castle and would certainly have known it – though without the concrete carbuncles added by the Germans during their Second World War occupation of the island (the story of which is told in several interesting island museums). In fact, Renoir may have studied the views around this castle more carefully than anyone previously thought.

When one of the paintings for the exhibition was unpacked, a member of museum staff commented that the date on it was wrong. It said 1881. Then she noticed the title, Baie de Salerne (Bay of Salerno) “But it’s Guernsey” she protested, instantly identifying it as a view across St Peter Port harbour, complete with the castle and lighthouse. Other islanders were equally convinced, which set a hare running: Is this picture Italy or Guernsey? “We are talking to the museum that owns it in Le Havre,” says David Ummels, Founder of Art for Guernsey and driving force behind the exhibition, “We shall see!”

Perhaps next time Renoir’s works revisit Guernsey we will be saying he painted at least 16 pictures here. The heart of his art on this island, however, will always be the bathers and the ever-changing light of Moulin Huet Bay.

Need to know

Getting there: Guernsey is a 35-minute flight from Gatwick with Guernsey’s airline, Aurigny. Ferries (passengers and vehicle) take three hours from Poole, Dorset, or seven hours from Portsmouth.

Accommodation: There is a wide range of accommodation on the island from classic beach hotels to an 18^th-century tower, waterside shepherds huts to holiday cottages close to Moulin Huet Bay. The only five-star hotel is the wonderfully traditional historic Old Government House Hotel.  Once the governor’s residence, but already a hotel by Renoir’s day, it is very conveniently located in St Peter Port, five minutes’ walk downhill to the seafront, five minutes up to the Guernsey Museum.

Eating out: Octopus serves perfectly-cooked fresh seafood as well as street food snacks, steaks and more, close to the La Valette pools. Eat outside, or within the glass wall, with glorious sea views. The Hook is a relaxed trendy venue on the town waterfront, specialising in sushi, seafood, cocktails and steak. The individual beef wellington is rightly lauded, and the fish delicious too.  

Anything else: Alongside the Guernsey Museum’s main exhibition, Renoir in Guernsey, runs a small but highly informative exhibition, Renoir: A Day in 1883, about the island in Renoir’s time in the neighbouring Priaulx Library. 

The author travelled courtesy of Visit Guernsey

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