André Barbier, in Monet's Circle

André Barbier was born in Arras in 1883. He was twenty when he exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants, in 1903. The Salon d'Automne would follow, from 1909 to 1938, then the Salon des Tuileries, from 1924 to 1931: a steady, visible career as a landscape painter.

Gustave Geffroy, the Go-Between

It all runs through one man: Gustave Geffroy, art critic and Monet's first biographer. It was he who introduced Barbier to the master of Giverny. Sources differ on the date of their meeting — 1906 according to some, while Wikipedia places the start of their friendship in 1916 — but they agree on the essential point: Barbier became a familiar presence at the house and garden of Giverny, and kept up a correspondence with Monet.

His friends also included the composer Claude Debussy.

And Clemenceau?

It is sometimes said that Barbier brought Monet and Georges Clemenceau together. The chronology does not allow it: the two men had known each other since the early 1860s, when Clemenceau finished his medical studies in Paris. They lost touch, then reconnected in the late 1880s — "probably thanks to their mutual friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy," write the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie.

The connection lies elsewhere, then, and this is the more accurate picture: Barbier and Clemenceau moved in the same circle — Monet's — with Geffroy at its hub. On November 28, 1894, it was in fact at Giverny that Monet introduced Cézanne to Geffroy, Rodin, and Clemenceau.

Light Rather Than Motif

Barbier died in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1970. His “Côte Normande” shows what he took from that proximity: little in the image itself — a bay, calm water, a cliff — and everything in the light, that bright band breaking through under a grey sky.