Postcard from Guernsey: Renoir returns to the island

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It’s early autumn, and in an open clearing overlooking the sheltered bay of Moulin Huet, Natalia Silvester has marshalled her tables and chairs in readiness for a new kind of customer.

She has renamed her café the “Renoir Tea Garden”, prepared a Renoir cappuccino stencil, hung a selection of Renoir prints on the wall, and arranged a long terrace ready for wannabe Impressionists with their sketchpads. After all, the view from the terrace has hardly changed since the painter set up his easel here in 1883.

Her rebranding is timely, because this autumn, 140 years after his last visit, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is about to return to the island of Guernsey — in spirit, at least. A small but charming exhibition of his landscapes, sourced from the US, UK and France, opens on the island at the end of this month. And such has been the advance interest that “going to Guernsey for the Renoir” could easily become “a thing”. 

By the time he came to Guernsey in 1883, Renoir was already famous — but he was also entering a creative dry period, telling his agent he had “forgotten how to paint”. Needing a change of scene, he chose this 24-square-mile island off the coast of Normandy, and over a five-week stay he travelled out to the bay at Moulin Huet every day, capturing the changing light in 15 canvases. Whereas most of his previous output had been focused on people, this landscape-based work sparked a new direction.

Big institutions like the Musée d’Orsay understand that culture needs to spread into remote locations’

For islanders, the Renoir connection has long been common knowledge, but the wider resurgence of interest is down to one comparatively recent incomer — and a painting he bought. I meet David Ummels, 52, in his new gallery in St Peter Port, the island’s capital. As he shows me round, the bearded Belgian explains how he first settled on Guernsey with his family eight years ago, intending to swap a rewarding career in finance, partly in London, for a peaceful island life.

Eager to contribute, he founded the charity Art for Guernsey, whose projects range from bringing in visiting artists who lead school and community workshops, to supporting students on visits to London galleries, and running art classes in Guernsey’s prison. In 2019 the charity opened the Renoir Walk in the Moulin Huet Valley, a self-guided trail with five empty, outdoor picture frames that offer the same viewpoints as the artist’s paintings.

In 2020, Ummels spotted one of Renoir’s 15 Guernsey canvases in a Christie’s catalogue and saw an opportunity. He and a group of local backers acquired “Rochers de Guernesey avec personnages” for £443,000, in order to make it available to Art for Guernsey.

Initially he toured the painting around the island’s schools to inspire creative workshops. But its long-term function was as a calling card, “an ambassador to allow us to sit at the table with the big international museums”, says Ummels, and thus enable the charity to pull together its own Renoir exhibition.

It has succeeded in bringing seven of the 15 Guernsey paintings together, along with three later works inspired by the artist’s time on the island, with loans from London’s National Gallery, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Cincinnati Art Museum and the Musée d’Art Moderne André Malraux in Le Havre. “Big institutions like the Musée d’Orsay understand that culture needs to spread into remote locations”, Ummels says.

When the show finally opens, it will not be in Art for Guernsey’s new gallery, which Ummels hopes will be a key player in the revitalisation of the old town. Despite being the largest exhibition space on the island, this new venue doesn’t yet have the requisite security and conservationist credentials to host high-value artworks, so instead Renoir in Guernsey will open in the Guernsey Museum up in Candie Gardens, overlooking the town, along with a photographic exhibition capturing the light of Moulin Huet, archive images of what life was like on the island back in 1883, and 530 tile paintings by primary school children, inspired by the “Rochers de Guernesey avec personnages”.

It all adds up to great island marketing, and when it’s all over, Ummels will breathe a huge sigh of relief — albeit a shortlived one. JMW Turner spent some creative time on Guernsey too, so that, they hope, is for next year. 

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