Far more Impressionist pictures can be seen in the region covered by this tour than in any other territory of comparable size. This should be no surprise, as this is the region where Impressionism was born and where it was most practised, and the tour visits some of the key sites in that development. Attention is also paid to the precursors – Pre-Impressionists such as Eugène Boudin and Jongkind – and to some Post-Impressionist successors.

As it was for mainstream artists, so it was for rebels and innovators: throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Paris was the centre of the art world. All the French Impressionists spent time here, many lived here for most of their lives.

Yet the essence of their art – the recording of the world about them as it presented itself to their eyes in its immediate, transitory aspect – required them to spend time in the countryside. And the countryside they frequented most was in the north and north-west of Paris, the broad valley of the meandering Seine and of its tributaries the Oise and the Epte, and on to the coast.

This can be illustrated by the case of Claude Monet, the most consistent exponent of Impressionism. He was born in Paris in 1840 and was brought up from 1845 in Le Havre on the Normandy coast before returning to Paris to study painting. Though Paris remained the centre of his artistic world, he made frequent painting expeditions to river and sea, and from 1871 he made his homes in the suburbs, progressively further downstream at Argenteuil, Vétheuil, Poissy and finally, in 1883, at Giverny.

Impressionism was developing at the same time as seaside tourism on France’s northern coast (the Mediterranean was not a holiday destination until later) and the relationship between the two is fascinating. Water, fresh or salt, was an important ingredient of Impressionist pictures, its fleeting, changing, evanescent qualities similar to the characteristics of light they sought to capture on canvas. The Impressionist emphasis on the importance of painting en plein air makes a tour that includes sites where painters set up their easel particularly rewarding.

Most of the world’s greatest collections of Impressionism are located in this region, and many of the art museums visited have been refurbished and extended. The Musée d’Orsay is due to open its newly renovated Impressionist galleries in autumn 2011.

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