Beach in Pourville

Beach in Pourville is a view Claude Monet painted from the clifftop above Pourville, a small resort just west of Dieppe on the Normandy coast, in 1882. The beach sweeps away from us in a long pale curve, the sea a milky green, and far off a headland of white chalk closes the bay. The canvas belongs to the National Museum in Poznań. It is the only painting by Monet in a Polish public collection and was missing for almost a decade after a theft in 2000.

What you're looking at

Monet stands high up, at the edge of a cliff whose dark, rusty face fills the lower right corner. From there the eye drops onto a crescent of sand, pinkish and violet in color, edged by a thin wavering line of surf. The beach runs up and away to the right, toward a scatter of small buildings and a patch of red that may be roofs or bathing tents. Beyond, a green plateau rises to a fortress-like stack of chalk, the next headland along the coast. Past it the coastline fades into a blue haze on the horizon.

The sea takes the whole left half. Monet paints it in thin, light greens and turquoise with short horizontal flicks for the swell, and a few loops of white for the wavelets running onto the sand. In the shallows he lets the color go almost transparent, so that a pale shape under the water reads as a rock seen through it. The sky is a lively mix of cream clouds and blue, brushed in curling strokes. A long violet shadow thrown across the sand at the bottom right suggests a low sun; the French title adds soleil couchant, at sunset.

Pourville, 1882

Monet's finances were precarious at the start of 1882. His dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had been shaken by the crash of the Union Générale bank. Monet had just moved to Poissy with Alice Hoschedé and their combined children, and he disliked the place. In February he went to Dieppe to find motifs, did not like it either, and settled instead a few kilometers away in Pourville, at a small hotel run by Paul Graff, whose portrait he painted (see Portrait of Père Paul). He came back with the family in the summer. The two stays produced close to a hundred canvases of cliffs, beach, church and sea.

Siblings from the same months include Cliff Walk at Pourville, The Rocks at Pourville, Low Tide and Cliffs near Dieppe. The wider stretch of coast he painted from Étretat to Dieppe is mapped on Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

The picture is a mid-size canvas, 60 by 73 centimeters, painted outdoors. Monet keeps the paint thin in the sea and sky and lets the weave of the canvas show. He loads it more thickly on the clouds and the cliff edge. The steep, high viewpoint with no horizon to anchor the foreground is typical of his 1880s coastal work. It owes something to Japanese prints, which he collected, and gives the beach its swooping, almost aerial curve.

Theft and recovery

The painting was shown in Berlin by Paul Cassirer in 1905 and bought in 1906 for the museum in Poznań. In 1945 it was taken to the Soviet Union and returned to Poznań in 1956. In September 2000 a man posing as an art student cut it out of its frame and left a copy painted on cardboard in its place. The swap went unnoticed for several days. Police traced the thief through fingerprints years later, and the canvas was recovered in January 2010. After conservation, it went back on display; damage from the cutting remains near the signature.

Where to see it

Beach in Pourville hangs in the National Museum in Poznań, in western Poland. It is a long way from the main Monet collections in Paris, but it offers a good sense of what Monet was doing on the Channel coast in the early 1880s. For other places to see his work, see where to see Monet's paintings.