Jean-Paul LAURENS (Fourquevaux, 1838 - Paris, 1921) View of the cliff of Yport Oil on canvas. Unsigned. (Lined). 41 x 24 cm Provenance: Probably collection of the writer Hector Malot (1830-1907), Paris, 1882. Jean-Paul Laurens stayed on the Normandy coast from the beginning of the 1870s before settling in Yport in an old rope factory that he converted into a picturesque medieval dwelling. It is then that he painted the rare pure landscapes that we know of him. Never exhibited during his lifetime, he probably intended them for his friends and family, such as the writer Hector Malot, author of Sans famille and a native of Normandy, at whose house Jules Clarétie was able to see around 1882: "a cliff among others, sheer overhanging a stretch of sea. It is admirable" and could well be our painting. The site seems to have fascinated the artist, since in 1886 he wrote to his friend Gaston Schéfer that he was still working on "two studies of cliffs"; moreover, Laurens' only published landscape also depicts a cliff at Yport.