Boats at Honfleur, Reimagined (2024)

Honfleur, France (2024)

It's been more than a year since I created this image. And still I keep returning to it.

Edward William Cooke painted Boats at Honfleur in 1833. I saw it at the Musée Eugène Boudin, framed in white under a green light. It's clarity, the lines and colors, struck me, but it was the light and the shadows that captured my attention. Earlier that day I had been standing on the edge of the Port of Honfleur, looking at la Lieutenance from very nearly the same vantage point. The buildings have been altered over time, a low harbor wall has been added, new(er) townhouse style buildings now line the left side. Modern boats are docked peacefully along the harbor wall. But, when I saw this painting . . . when I recalled this view . . . I saw not the detail with which Cooke captured the large blocks of stone used in building the towers, not the pink face of one building and the blue roof of the one next to it, not even the row boat to the side of the sinking sailboat or the other boats in the background. I saw the blue clouds rising over the harbor contrasted by the brighter white clouds indicating, perhaps, a summer storm; I saw the purplish shadows cast across the water, the light illuminating one tower while an adjacent one was obscured in a rising dusk. I saw the darkened silhouettes of boat and man.

Leo Tolstoy, in his book What is Art?, talks of methods which produce imitations of art. The first of these is “borrowing whole subjects, or merely separate features, from former works recognized by everyone as being poetical, and in so reshaping them with sundry additions that they should have an appearance of novelty.” This is precisely what I did with Cooke’s painting. I reimagined this poetical work as an impressionist would.

The Tate Museum tells of the early impressionists success at capturing a greater awareness of color, and in attempting to render the momentary and transient effects of light, the fleeting quality of light, which shifted the patterns of the natural scene, they worked rapidly, resulting in brush strokes that could be described as broken or isolated. They worked en plein air, their subjects in front of them, rather than in the distance of an artifically lit studio. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/i/impressionism)

Cooke was a painter of land and marine scapes, not an impressionist. In fact, he was producing works five decades before the first Impressionist exhibit. But what if I could isolate what I had seen in his painting, what I had seen standing on the edge of the harbor, and capture the feeling of it.

Tolstoy goes on to say that poetic means borrowing, and that “all borrowing merely recalls to the [viewer] some dim recollection of artistic impressions they received from previous works of art and does not infect them with feeling which the artist has himself experienced.”

If the aim of art is to infect people with feeling experienced by the artist, as Tolstoy repeatedly points out, then shouldn’t the art first inspire feeling in the artist?

It’s not for me to say whether this piece is real art according to Tolstoy’s standards, and he carefully avoids saying that imitation art cannot also be true art, but if it is derived from my own feeling, and each time I look at it I am reminded of Cooke and something so poetical as La Lieutenance and Honfleur, shouldn’t I dare to hope that it also infects the viewer with feeling?