Studio: international art (23.1901)

Le Treport

the old champleve work. The metals which lend
themselves readily to this class of work are gold,
silver, and copper. Copper is the one which has
been most commonly used at all times. The best
copper for this purpose is not pure; it is composed
of i lb. of pure copper to i oz. of zinc. The
alloy of zinc prevents the edges of the copper
from oxidising into a rough burr, which is most
unpleasant to work with.

(To be continued.)

LE TREPORT AS A SKETCH-
ING GROUND. BY FRANK L.
EMANUEL.

About an hour's railway journey from Dieppe is
the seaport and bathing-station of Treport, a town
of some 4,500 inhabitants. Although thoroughly
appreciated by many of the foremost marine
painters of France, it has been almost entirely
neglected by British artists. You can, therefore,
go and work there without feeling that you are
about to tackle a set of hackneyed themes.

There are clean, comfortable hotels, with good
views from their windows, wherein one can live
well at from about six shillings per diem upwards.
Personal experience allows me to recommend the

A STREET IN TREPORT BV F. L. EMANUEL

96

Grand Hotel de Calais, situated at a corner where
the edge of a small cliff puts an end to the wander-
ings of the main street, and thus forces all wayfarers
to admire the view over the harbour and cliffs to
the open sea beyond. The courtyard of this hotel
is very paintable : one side of it nestles directly
beneath the sixteenth-century church tower; and
another, fringed by a tiny garden, is open and over-
looks the harbour. An interesting fact about the
hotel is, that a former proprietor bequeathed it to
the town in trust for the poor.

The fashionable hotels are grouped together near
the beach, where a line of piquant villas present their
dainty faces to the sea. The whole of the ground-
floor front of these houses consists of a large
window, and one can peep in and appreciate the
admirable taste with which the interiors are
decorated. To think of their counterparts in
England makes one shudder. Many of these
coquettish little houses look too fragile to outlive
the violent storms which visit this part of the coast
during the winter, and raise the heavy seas for
which the place seems noted.

Perhaps the gay little " plage," with its eyesore
of a casino, its little street of bathing cabins, its
planks, and striped tents, may cause you to shrug
your shoulders and ask where the art is going to
come in. Perhaps you are not a figure painter.
If you were, you would see on this lively fluttering
beach subjects innumerable. First, watch the
little tete-a-tctes in the tents, and then that won-
derful stream of humanity in bathing costumes,
swathed in flowing white togas, pushing its way
through a quizzing crowd up and down the
planks to and from the sea. Then the bathing
itself—why, the sea is all a-bob and a-splutter
with rotund men and coquettish dames. The
whole performance of bathing is superintended
by a couple of tough seamen in a boat and a
score of equally tough and jovial bathing men.

I was nearly forgetting to mention the brusque
old Pyrennean milkman with his uncanny flock of
grave black goats; and the Italian boy, tramping
about with a big red cylinder labelled " Plaisir
des dames," filled with light cakes to be won by
lottery. Then there are troops of slender-ankled,
brawny-armed, washerwomen, laying their washing
on the sun-heated cobbles to dry. At low tide the
weather-worn fishwives come down across the wet
sands to trudge for hours in the shallow waters
with their shrimp nets. They form a remarkable
contrast to their fair-weather rivals, who seem to
imagine that they can lure the small fry into
their nets by a generous display of their charms.