 Hello, my name is Nancy Eisen, I am the Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation and you're joining me for Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art. Today we're in gallery five of the Barnes Foundation and we're going to look at a wonderful seascape by the French artist Georges Chorat who was born in Paris in 1859 and I think it's just such a wonderful outdoors painting. We're looking at it right in the centre of the main part of the wall there and really its luminosity just hits us as we walk into the room. You can see that Barnes put it on this wall because each of the canvases has that stretch of blue at the top of the horizon line so we get a nice balance of colour. But for me personally the Soura is the absolute knockout painting. It's just so light and bright and it really makes me think of being by the sea which I'm sure if you're like me is something that is just so wonderful and enjoyable. So let's look closely at the painting. It was made by Soura in the summer of 1886. He had the habit of going to the northern coast of France every summer. He'd done that as a child with his family and at this time in his 20s it was a habit that he kept up. He tended to go to a slightly different part of the coast each year and this part is called Enfleur. It's a port town. You can still visit it now and in the 1800s it had been a very bustling port. By the time Soura is there in 1886 it's slightly quieter than it had been but there's still plenty going on. Lots of tourists would go there and it's a place where you could just enjoy the outdoors. We know that Soura rented rooms with a customs officer there so really you know it was geared up for this kind of trip and Soura went with the ambition of making a few paintings. Now unfortunately we know that the weather was a bit variable. He ends up leaving town probably mid-August. He jokes to a friend that he might leave on Friday the 13th and that would potentially be a bad thing. The weather had been a bit variable so he really hadn't achieved everything that he'd wanted to do but again from his letters we know that he created about six paintings at least a couple of drawings one of which was a study for this work and I think it's a great achievement. I mean if I produced anything like this in a couple of months I'd be more than happy. Now how do we know it is en fleur? One of the very distinctive features in the en fleur landscape is its lighthouse and there we have just in the corner this wonderful structure with its white body with its sort of pinkish light at the top and in a canvas where there aren't a lot of people it almost takes on the presence of a figure. It's also a wonderful excuse for Soura to describe reflections. You can see how from its place on the harbour side Soura creates a vertical line and in the water that white is picked up once again just little dashes of white amongst the blue and the golden giving you a sense of the shimmering surface of the water and just again to return to this sort of emptiness I wonder perhaps if we have a little figure on one of the sailboats in the foreground perhaps this little touch of red might indicate a person but by and large we're left to enjoy the scene and to enjoy the colours and to enjoy the way of painting. You can just see here again how Soura really enjoys placing colours one beside the other. He enjoys the contrast of colours we have reds against purples we have greens against golds colour contrast was something that really fascinated Soura and that was very important because it set him apart from painters of a different generation so I'm just going to focus out again at the overall scene now Soura being in his 20s at this point was younger than the impressionist artist who had made their name in Paris just slightly beforehand and with this new way of working with this wonderful broken brushstroke Soura was effectively pitting himself against those older artists he was essentially defining himself as part of a new generation and when he writes about this way of painting he calls it my method and he underlines that expression he's very keen to show that he is doing something very different that it is based in science colour theory was very important to Soura and it was something that was taught at the art schools in the 1880s and really Soura embraces that for him this is not so much a painting about feelings or sensations it's about the way in which your eye blends colour and I think this is particularly evident in these little outhouses here where you see the greens and the reds and the blues all just playing off against one another and I think that the site of Enfleur then becomes more important because it had been a place that the impressionist artists had visited we have views of Enfleur by Monet and his peers and so Soura by taking on this heritage really shows us that contrast very starkly and this is somewhere new and different and in in his eyes the location might be the same but we're seeing it afresh however and this is probably where I would have annoyed Soura if he was here to hear me for me this painting defies its own scientific qualities and it does create a wonderful sense of atmosphere we really feel as if we're by the harbour and I'm not alone in thinking this and this was something that viewers in Soura's day also acknowledged and I want to read you an excerpt from a review of Soura's pictures of Enfleur that was made in 1887 and here we are the seascapes that Soura exhibits this year his views of Enfleur especially his lighthouse rest again on this particular feeling that he expresses of a nature more lulling than melancholy a nature that reposes indifferently and disguised without passion sheltered from the winds those who wish to a free to prefer less cold and more vivid impressions or to love beaches more bustling and noisy for me these works have a particular charm that I cannot deny I find in them a fullness of expansive air a siesta of a quiet soul a distinction of one indolence a caressing lullaby of the sea that soothes and dissipates my weary cares and I just love that last line that soothes and dissipates my weary cares and I really hope that in looking at this wonderful seascape that you find some of that relaxation that a critic found in looking at Soura's work in 1887 this shimmering magical picture is one that I hope you'll revisit when you come to the Barnes Foundation next and in the meantime please do tune in for more Barnes Takeout tomorrow and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel thanks so much and see you again soon bye bye