Aiguilles de Port-Coton, Belle-Île
Aiguilles de Port-Coton
Interesting facts
- Monet painted no fewer than 39 works during his roughly ten-week stay on Belle-Île in 1886.
- Constant changes of cloud, wind and rain pushed Monet to paint the same motifs again and again, an early step towards his later series of haystacks and cathedrals.
- Monet hired a local man named Poly to carry his easels and canvases along the steep cliff paths, and kept a sketch he made of him.
- The Port-Coton canvases were first shown in 1887 at Georges Petit's Paris gallery, and again in 1889 in the joint Monet–Rodin exhibition there.
- The critic Gustave Geffroy met Monet by chance on Belle-Île in September 1886 while researching a book on prisons, the start of a lifelong friendship.
- The Australian painter John Peter Russell, the first outsider to settle on Belle-Île, built a house that locals called the Englishman's Castle.
- Henri Matisse visited Russell on Belle-Île in 1897 and 1898, was introduced there to Impressionism and Van Gogh, and later called Russell his teacher.
- The needles are carved from schists and mica schists of the Ordovician and Silurian periods, worn into stacks by Atlantic erosion.
- Belle-Île is the largest island of Brittany and the third-largest in metropolitan France, after Corsica and Oléron.
Why it is worth it
On the wild Atlantic coast of Belle-Île, the largest island off Brittany, a cluster of rock needles stands in the sea at the mouth of a narrow inlet called Port-Coton. Under a heavy swell the waves burst white against their bases, and the foam that hangs over the water like a veil of cotton is said to have given the place its name. The stacks extend the southern ridge of the cove, whose tiny beach of coarse sand cannot be reached from land.
The rocks owe their fame to Claude Monet. He arrived in Le Palais, the island's main town, on 12 September 1886, intending to stay a fortnight, and left only on 25 November. In letters to Alice Hoschedé he called this coast sinister, diabolical and magnificent, and he painted the same group of needles six times from one viewpoint, under clear midday light, mist, broken cloud and the warm sun of late afternoon, with the sea shifting from calm to storm. The series, The Pyramids of Port-Coton, is now divided among the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, the museum in Caracas and other collections. The Australian painter John Peter Russell, who worked alongside Monet on the island, painted the needles in 1890, and Charles Cottet took them up in 1900.
Belle-Île measures about 17 by 9 km, and its southwestern side, the Côte Sauvage, is a line of sheer cliffs, coves and reefs facing the open Atlantic, in contrast with the sheltered beaches and harbours of the northeast. Port-Coton lies in the commune of Bangor, near the island's great lighthouse and the cove of Port-Goulphar. Onlookers have long read shapes into the needles — a small Mont-Saint-Michel, a howling dog or wolf, a brooding hen, a sphinx, even the bust of Louis XIV.
Getting there
The needles lie on the west coast of Belle-Île, about 8 km from Le Palais; the departmental road D190 ends at a car park on the headland opposite. Ferries reach Le Palais from Quiberon, about 14 km across the water, and from Vannes and Port-Navalo; Sauzon is served from Quiberon and Lorient. The nearest mainland city is Lorient, about 50 km away. Lorient Bretagne Sud Airport (LRT) is about 55 km from the needles in a straight line and Nantes Atlantique (NTE) about 125 km, both on the mainland.
On these lists
47.30556, -3.24028per Wikidata