AAs my train slowly pulled into the station at La Souterraine, about three hours south of Paris, on a scorching June afternoon, the woman in the seat next to me asked: “Did you come down here?” Her expression seemed to say, “Really? You’re getting out Here?”
I understood what she meant. Behind the chain-link fence that lined the platform, a handful of industrial buildings lay next to nondescript farmland.
I had arrived in La Creuse – one of the departments that the French France deep – the deepest and darkest France – and apparently the least visited region of the country, north of Limoges and 65 miles southeast of Poitiers.
But after just a few minutes, the road started to climb: I drove through rolling hills and strikingly green valleys, with overhanging hedges separating the fields and pastures where the rust-colored Limousin cattle grazed in the sun.
I was looking for the landscape that inspired the painter Claude Monet, a landscape that is relatively unknown compared to the images of Rouen, Paris and London that he often painted.
In early 1889, several years before he began his world-famous water lily series, Monet spent several months in the countryside near the small village of Fresselines, about an hour’s drive north of Limoges.
Like his fellow Impressionists, the 49-year-old Monet was looking for places where he could paint outdoors, and a friend of his, the art critic Gustave Geffroy, suggested La Creuse.
Monet soon became fascinated by the raging rapids and the jagged, heather-covered granite gorge where two sections of the Creuse meet, and on several visits that year he spent several days clambering over the often slippery rocks, accompanied by a farm hand who carried his canvases, paints and easel.
By the end of May, he had completed 23 paintings depicting the dramatic landscape in varying light, using a vibrant palette of rich mauves and often almost Fauvist reds and oranges.
It would be another ten years before Monet completed his far more famous series of views of the Thames – soon to be the subject of a major exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery (27 September 2024–19 January 2025). But experts now agree that although he had painted Paris’s Saint Lazare station several times before, La Creuse was the first time he attempted to capture the same landscape at different times of day and in different light.
FFrom Fresselines, a self-guided walking route (maps available at tourisme-creuse.com or local tourist offices) leads to the sites painted by Monet, so after a night at the delightful Domaine de la Jarrige – a rural B&B with gardens full of foxgloves and chickens – I set off to visit them.
I had arranged with the art historian and Monet expert Christophe Rameix to do the three-kilometer circular walk, and we walked through the dense beech forest that lines the banks of the Creuse.
Information boards line the makeshift path, displaying copies of Monet’s paintings in the locations where he painted them. This was “a place of grandiose and wild beauty,” Monet wrote to his wife, complaining about the cold. He wore special lined gloves to keep his hands warm.
Eventually the path led upwards, and after climbing over slippery stones and steps, we reached the bank from which Monet had looked down when he set up his easel at the confluence of the two rivers.
“Monet was fascinated by water,” Rameix told me as the river rushed past us. “He wanted to capture its movement, even its sound.”
In Fresselines – a tiny hamlet of neat houses, including a church with a bas-relief by Rodin – the main attraction, besides the Monet walk, is the Espace Monet–Rollinat, a large barn-like building with a permanent exhibition on Monet’s time in La Creuse and copies of all the works he created here.
Monet was by no means the only painter drawn to La Creuse. From around 1880, the village of Crozant, a 15-minute drive from Fresselines, was a popular destination for impressionists and post-impressionists in the countryside, where the so-called “Crozant School” emerged.
Around 500 painters, including Armand Guillaumin, Léon Détroy, Francis Picabia (later known as a Cubist, Dadaist and Surrealist) as well as the English Impressionist Wynford Dewhurst, came to the area, attracted by the spectacular Lac d’Éguzon (imagine a Gallic Windermere, complete with moorings, kayaking, waterside cafes and guided boat tours) and the dramatic, almost Gothic-looking ruins of a medieval castle towering high above it.
In the 1920s, the area around Crozant and Fresselines became known as the Vallée des Peintres and one of the artists’ main original meeting places, the Hotel Lépinat on Crozant’s main square, now houses an interpretation centre telling the story of this often overlooked episode with the exhibition of original Impressionist works.
After an astonishingly inexpensive lunch in the gourmet restaurant Auberge de la Vallée opposite (two courses €26), it was only a few minutes’ walk to the Sentier des Peintres (Painters’ Trail), which takes you in a circular route along the banks of the Sédelle, past rapids and 19th-century mill buildings with information boards showing the works created there.
I could easily have spent days hiking through this beautiful landscape, but my final destination was the Rocher de la Fileuse (“Spider Rock”) – one of the most painted sites in the area.
After a short walk uphill between plum trees, butterflies and the occasional heather, I felt like I was on top of the world, looking down on the ruins of Crozant Castle, surrounded by rivers on either side.
It wasn’t hard to see why the rock was such an inspiration. I just wondered why La Creuse wasn’t better known.
The trip was offered by Creuse Tourisme, Atout France and Eurostar. Eurostar offers return tickets from London to Paris from £78; SNCF offers return tickets from Paris to La Souterraine from £26.50. The Hotel du Lac in Crozant offers double rooms with breakfast from €85. The Domaine de la Jarrige offers double rooms with breakfast from €1.29
