Desiring the shore: Adolphe Lalyre and the sirens of carteret

Abstract

Adolphe Lalyre was a high-profile French painter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who has now largely fallen into obscurity. Seemingly unmoved by the series of movements in Modern Art that came to prominence during his lifetime - including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism - he persisted with a style of painting derived from Symbolism, initially favouring religious themes before moving on to a series of works representing (human-form) sirens during an extended residency at Carteret, on the coast of Normandy. The French term sirène refers to both human-form female water spirits and fish-tailed ones of the type usually referred to in English as mermaids. This article explores the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of Lalyre's sirène paintings and discusses the pleasures and temptations they offered the viewer at an historical moment when Modernism, and Modernity more generally, was in its ascendancy. Our analysis examines Lalyre's work within the specifically local context of Carteret and, more broadly, with late 19th and early 20th Century France, focusing on the importance of the artist and visual representations in the process of place-making and especially with regard to shifts in the meaning of sea and shore, along with the rise of the tourism industry.