The Cove at Cape Suzon 1898

Maxime Maufra likely painted "The Cove at Cape Suzon" with oil on canvas at the turn of the 20th century. Maufra painted frequently en plein air along the coast of Brittany, a rural region in France, as part of a community of landscape painters. But what does it mean to paint the landscape at this time? The late 19th century was a period of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and social change in France. Paintings of rural life were therefore not neutral depictions of nature but embodied a collective nostalgia for a simpler way of life and the romanticization of peasant culture, ideas associated with conservative politics. At the same time, landscape painting was promoted by the French academy and the École des Beaux-Arts as a genre of 'high art,' so it was also a marker of social status and cultural refinement. If we want to understand what this painting meant to Maufra and his contemporaries, we need to delve deeper into the social, political, and artistic conventions of the time by using art historical sources and social histories of 19th-century France.