Honfleur, the harbour that taught painters to see light

Honfleur is usually the first piece of France a British cruise passenger sees, and it is not a bad one to start with. The Vieux Bassin, the old harbour basin, is lined on one side with houses so tall and narrow they seem to have been built by people short of both land and patience, six and seven storeys of slate-hung timber leaning gently towards the water. Fishing boats still tie up in front of them. It looks, more or less, exactly as it does in the paintings, because a great many of the paintings were made looking at precisely this view.

The man who told Monet to go outside

Eugène Boudin was born in Honfleur in 1824, the son of a harbour pilot, and he grew up watching the light change over the estuary of the Seine, where the river's fresh water meets the Channel's tides and the sky does something restless and specific that inland French light does not quite manage. Boudin made a career of painting exactly that: skies, beaches and the fashionable crowds who came to nearby Trouville and Deauville to be seen taking the sea air, rendered with a loose, fast touch that tried to catch weather rather than describe it.

In 1858, Boudin met a seventeen-year-old caricaturist from Le Havre named Claude Monet and persuaded him to leave the studio and paint outdoors, in front of the subject, in whatever light happened to be available that morning. Monet later said that Boudin had, quite simply, opened his eyes. It is not too large a claim to say that Impressionism, an entire movement built on the idea that a painting should record a fleeting moment of light rather than a fixed and finished scene, began with that conversation on the Normandy coast. Painters gathered at the Ferme Saint-Siméon on the edge of Honfleur through the 1860s, among them Monet, Boudin and the Dutch landscape painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, working in the fields above the harbour they could all see from the door.

A church built by people who knew ships, not stonemasons

Honfleur's other unmistakable landmark stands a short walk from the harbour and looks, from a distance, like nothing else in French church architecture. Sainte-Catherine was built in the second half of the fifteenth century, after the Hundred Years' War had left the town's masons dead or scattered and its money short. So the shipwrights of Honfleur built it instead, using the only skills and materials they had: timber and the techniques of hull construction, upturned like an inverted ship's keel over the nave. It is the largest wooden church in France, and its free-standing bell tower stands separately across the square, apparently because nobody wanted to risk the weight of a bell tower on a wooden roof, or the fire risk of striking the two together.

Honfleur's older history is maritime rather than artistic. Samuel de Champlain sailed from the port in 1608 on the voyage that founded Quebec, and for centuries before and after, Honfleur shipped salt, wine and, less happily, took part in France's share of the transatlantic slave trade, a history the town does not hide from its visitors. The harbour's usefulness declined as ships grew too large for it and the nearby deep-water port of Le Havre took the traffic instead, which is precisely what left Honfleur's old quarter intact rather than redeveloped: a stroke of bad luck for the merchants of the day that is now the town's chief asset.

Getting there

A great many short cruises from British ports use Honfleur as their single call in France, which suits a town built to be absorbed in a few hours rather than a week. Ambassador's Short Escape to Charming Honfleur, three nights from Bristol, does exactly what its name suggests, and the four-night Weekend Voyage to Northern France from London Tilbury adds a night at sea either side of the same call.

Around the festive season, Festive Flavours of Honfleur & Cherbourg pairs the harbour with its larger neighbour along the coast, four nights that turn a single town into a short tour of the Normandy shore. Spring and early autumn suit Honfleur best: the light Boudin painted is at its most changeable then, and the crowds that fill the quayside cafés in August have generally moved on by September.

A morning is enough for the harbour and the church; an afternoon leaves time to walk up to the Côte de Grâce above the town, where the view over the Seine estuary is the one that drew the painters in the first place, and where it is still entirely possible to see why.