The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse was painted by Claude Monet in the summer of 1867 on the Normandy coast just west of Le Havre, where his family lived. The canvas, 75.8 by 102.5 centimeters (Wildenstein 92), is signed and dated "67" at lower right and hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. A companion picture of the same beach on a regatta day, The Regatta at Sainte-Adresse, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

What you are looking at

The pale shingle beach curves away from the lower left toward the village of Sainte-Adresse, whose houses and church spire climb the hill at the far left. In the foreground, working boats are drawn up on the stones: a dark hull at the left with fishermen standing beside it, and in the center two boats, one painted a bright blue, lying on their sides above the water. Baskets and nets lie on the shingle.

Two figures sit on the beach between the boats, picked out by small strokes of red and yellow: a man in a dark hat looking out to sea through a telescope and a woman in a straw hat with a scarlet ribbon. Their town clothes mark them as visitors. Out on the green water a fleet of fishing boats with dark brown sails tilts in the wind, and more sails dot the horizon. More than half the canvas is given to the sky: a mass of gray and white cloud broken by patches of blue, painted with short, energetic strokes.

How it was painted

This is a picture of the moment just before Impressionism. The boats and fishermen are still solid and clearly drawn, but the sky and the pebbles are built from separate dabs of color, and the light is the flat, silvery light of an overcast Channel day. The beach is not beige but a field of cream, gray, lilac and blue touches. The sea is laid in with smooth horizontal strokes of jade and bottle green.

The Art Institute's conservators have found that Monet began the painting outdoors and revised it later in the studio. He first included more tourists and pleasure yachts, then painted them out, shifting the emphasis to the fishermen and their boats, the side of Sainte-Adresse he had known since childhood. The two visitors who remain turn what could be a traditional coastal scene into a picture of modern life: the old fishing village becoming a resort. The railway had reached Le Havre in 1847, and by the 1860s Sainte-Adresse was filling with villas and summer visitors. Monet sets the two worlds side by side without comment, the couple with their telescope only a few steps from men who make their living from the sea.

The summer of 1867

It was a difficult season. Monet was penniless, his father disapproved of his relationship with Camille Doncieux, and he spent the summer with his aunt at Sainte-Adresse while Camille, pregnant with their son Jean, stayed in Paris. Yet the summer produced some of his most confident early works, including the Garden at Sainte-Adresse, in which his father sits on a terrace above the sea, and The Green Wave. Two years earlier he had painted the headland nearby in La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide.

Monet had grown up in Le Havre, and the light of the Seine estuary formed him; Eugène Boudin first took him outdoors to paint there, and the habit of setting up an easel on the beach, facing the weather, began on this stretch of shore. The port next door would later give its name to the movement in Impression, Sunrise. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast follows his work on this coast across four decades.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago, which received it in 1933 with the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection; it usually hangs in the Impressionist galleries. More on Claude Monet.