André Marc, ‘Le Chanteur’, aboard his fishing boat, Loctudy, c.1959
Goudie’s First Rencontre with Brittany When I was born in 1976, my father was fortythree years old. By then he had been visiting and painting Brittany for over fifteen years and the story of his first rencontre with a landscape that would dominate his life as an artist, existed as part of a kind family lore. I remember dad holding forth at the dinner table as he recounted (yet again) his first visit to Brittany. My father described an impossibly romantic tale, one that flickered across my imagination, like a Pathé newsreel. It was December 1959, only a matter of months since he had met a young French girl named Marie-Renée Dorval in Glasgow, and now he was on his way to meet the parents. I visualised an animated route map, tracking his train journey from Scotland, across the channel aboard the boat-train, and onwards to Paris, where he boarded the ‘Quimper Express’. The ‘Express’, the story goes, turned out to be a provincial work-horse which crawled along the twilight chemin de fer, calling in at every regional town and village. And with every stop it seemed to dad that he was sliding decades into the past, as autoroutes gave way to muddy rural roads, tractors
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to horse-drawn ploughs, wide canopied stations to draughty platforms and telegraph offices. Six hours later my father finally disembarked in Quimper sporting a black, full-length trench coat and a distinct Paisley pallor. Here was an artistvampire hungry for inspiration but despite his epic journey he found himself in a town doing a very good impression of Glasgow; the streets were wintery, dark and damp. My mother, of course, brightened the encounter and was soon introducing her young Scottish artist to the family; five sisters, one of her five brothers, a suspicious pair of aunts and her parents, Dr Louis Dorval and his wife, Margeaux. There was, inevitably, a banquet, sudden and total immersion within the epic scale of Breton hospitality. Rich food, to which my father was unaccustomed, copious amounts of Muscadet which he accepted enthusiastically and the rowdy clamour of conversation and questions in a language he couldn’t understand. At one point my father excused himself, went to the bathroom and was sick. He returned, even paler than before, and accepted another glass of wine.
