01 Painting, Marine Art, Carlos Nadal's Dieppe. With Footnotes #309

Carlos Nadal  (1917-1998)

Dieppe, la plage, c. 1973

Oil and acrylic on canvas

23 1⁄2 x 28 3⁄4 in. (60 x 73 cm.)

Private collection

Sold for £21,420 in Mar 2022

Dieppe is a coastal commune in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy region of northern France.

A port on the English Channel, at the mouth of the river Arques, famous for its scallops, and with a regular ferry service to Newhaven in England, Dieppe also has a popular pebbled beach, a 15th-century castle and the churches of Saint-Jacques and Saint-Remi. The mouth of the river Scie lies at Hautot-sur-Mer, directly to the west of Dieppe. More on Dieppe

At 0523 hours, 19 August 1942, Captain Denis Whitaker and the men of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry listened as the hull of their flat-bottomed landing craft grated on the stone shingle of the broad beach fronting the French town of Dieppe. As the rising sun broke the horizon and revealed the outline of the town, Whitaker and his men peered over the ramp of the landing boat. They expected to see a town shattered by Royal Air Force bombs and Royal Navy shells, but to their shock they could see that even the storefront windowpanes were unbroken. Suddenly a hail of machine gun bullets peppered the side of the landing craft.

The Canadians had been promised that the town would be lightly defended. Instead they could see that Dieppe was a fortress, intact, and the Germans were ready and waiting. The ramp dropped and Whitaker and his men scrambled out onto the stony beach, bullets flying, bombs exploding. The bodies piled on top of one another. More on Dieppe: The Beaches of Hell

Carlos Nadal (24 April 1917 – 6 June 1998) was a Spanish painter of the Fauvist school

Nadal was born in Paris on 24 April 1917, but moved to Barcelona in 1921. His father, Santiago Nadal had a commercial design studio, where Carlos learnt to paint, and met modern artists including Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Utrillo.

Nadal studied at the School of Arts and Crafts and the Senior Fine Art Academy of St George, both in Barcelona. He was conscripted into the Spanish Republican Army and fought in the Spanish Civil War, including imprisonment and escape from a concentration camp, before finally returning to his art studies.

Nadal was particularly influenced by Henri Matisse whom he met as a child, and Georges Braque who was a close acquaintance in the 1940s, and maintained a love of the Fauvist style.

His first solo exhibition was in 1942 at La Pinacoteca in Barcelona. His early work was mainly of scenes in Spain or Belgium but when established as a successful artist he travelled extensively, making paintings which often featured modes of transport as well as leisure scenes.

On 1 December 1948 he married Flore Augusta Zoe Joris a Belgian sculptor, moving with her to Brussels in 1949. In 1958. They moved residence between Brussels and Barcelona. He died in Barcelona on 6 June 1998. More on Carlos Nadal

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