During the summer the island's population increases dramatically, as many people own a
second home on the island due to its secluded location and beaches.
Lyrique en Mer/Festival de Belle Île is the largest opera festival in western France. Founded in 1998 by American opera singer
Richard Cowan, the festival produces two staged operas every summer, conducted by Music Director Philip Walsh and directed by Mr. Cowan, the Artistic Director. Additionally, there are sacred concerts in all four of the island's historic churches, as well as many smaller concerts and Master Classes.
Lyrique en Mer has wide support from the French business community as well as from the
Conseil Général, the
Conseil Régional.
Depictions The island has been a popular location for artists.
Octave Penguilly L'Haridon's 1859 painting
Les Petites mouettes ("Little Gulls") (1858, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes) depicts the island. It was praised by
Maxime Du Camp and
Charles Baudelaire, who referred to the sense of the uncanny, as though the rocks make "a portal open to infinity...a
wound of white birds, and the solitude!" During the 1870s and 1880s, French
Impressionist painter
Claude Monet painted the rock formations at Belle Île. Monet's series of paintings of the rocks at Belle Île astounded the Paris art world when he first exhibited them in 1887. Most notable are the
Storm, Coast at Belle-Ile and
Cliffs at Belle-Ile both rendered in 1886. The first time
Auguste Rodin saw the ocean off the Brittany coast he exclaimed, “It’s a Monet." Australian born artist
John Russell was a man of means and after his marriage to an Italian woman, Mariana Antoinetta Matiocco, he settled at Belle Île off the coast of Brittany where he established an artists' colony. Russell had met
Vincent van Gogh in Paris and formed a friendship with him. Van Gogh spoke highly of Russell's work, and after his first summer in
Arles in 1888 he sent twelve drawings of his paintings to Russell, to inform him about the progress of his work. Monet often worked with Russell at Belle Île and influenced his style, though it has been said that Monet preferred some of Russell's Belle Île seascapes to his own. Russell did not attempt to make his pictures known. In 1897 and 1898
Henri Matisse visited Belle Île. Russell introduced him to impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh (who was relatively unknown at the time). Matisse's style changed radically, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me." The island is the setting for portions of the novel
The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later,
Alexandre Dumas père's second sequel to
The Three Musketeers. Dumas has his character
Aramis fortify the island (in place of Vauban, historically) and
Porthos dies there, in the caves of
Locmaria. ==Notable people==