Cliffs by the Sea at Cézembre, Brittany (c. 1830): Art, History and Details

Cliffs by the Sea at Cézembre, Brittany (c. 1830) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eugène Isabey (French, 1803–1886).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Eugène Isabey was primarily known for his watercolors and paintings of marine and beach scenes. As a young artist, he met and befriended Eugène Delacroix and Richard Parkes Bonington and traveled with them to England in 1825 where he was able to study the work of J. M. W. Turner and the English watercolorists. Isabey was one of the first French painters to work en plein air, or directly from nature. He proved to be an important French landscapist whose life spanned almost the entire 19th century. He contributed illustrations to the Voyage pittoresques et romantiques and became a sought-after watercolorist and painter of historical landscapes.

Object facts

• Title: Cliffs by the Sea at Cézembre, Brittany
• Date: c. 1830
• Creator attribution: Eugène Isabey (French, 1803–1886)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor and gouache with black chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 25.8 x 35 cm (10 3/16 x 13 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1993.218

Collection credit

Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland in honor of the Club's seventy-fifth anniversary

Further reading listed by the museum

• “1993 Annual Report.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 81, no. 6 (July 1994): 143–218.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.