Boats on the Beach at Étretat

Boats on the Beach at Étretat is one of the pictures Claude Monet painted during his long autumn stay at Étretat on the Normandy coast in 1885. The canvas, 66 by 82.3 centimeters (Wildenstein 1024), is in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it has a documented birthday: on 24 November 1885 Monet wrote to Alice Hoschedé that he had spent the afternoon in his room, working on his "caloges" in the rain.

What you are looking at

Monet looks down from a window onto the steep shingle beach. Across the foreground stand three or four strange dark shapes with pitched roofs. They are caloges: old fishing boats, too worn to sail, turned upside down and roofed with tarred planks or thatch to serve as sheds for nets and gear. In the 1880s they were a feature of Étretat's beach and they fascinated visiting painters.

Behind them, working boats are hauled up above the tideline: a dark hull with a red bottom at the left, a black boat beside it, and, in the middle distance, two boats with bright yellow hulls. Their bare masts tilt in every direction against the sky. Beyond, the sea is high and churning, painted in thick strokes of bottle green and dirty white, and the spray seems almost to reach the boats. At the right edge a stone house with a gray slate roof closes the composition, its wall streaked with ochre, pink and red.

How it was painted

The handling is rough and fast, the work of a painter who had to catch a scene through rain-streaked glass. Monet drags his brush across the roofs of the caloges in long, dry strokes, so they read like rough planking, and dashes the pebbles in with flecks of lilac, blue and cream. The wet surfaces of the beach and roofs are made of mixed pastel blues, pinks and greens, and the bright hulls give the dark structures their scale.

The high viewpoint flattens the space and piles the shapes up the canvas, from the dark sheds at the bottom to the white surf near the top. The palette is darker than his sunny Mediterranean pictures of the previous year, such as Bordighera, and the mood is closer to a working harbor than to a resort.

A pair from the hotel window

The Art Institute owns this picture's partner, The Departure of the Boats, Étretat. Both were painted from the window of Monet's room at the Hôtel Blanquet when bad weather kept him indoors, and they share a palette, a subject and a vantage point. In the same letter of 24 November he described trying "always through the window" to paint the boats leaving. One picture shows the fleet at rest, the other the same fleet putting to sea. Weather that drove other painters indoors became, for Monet, another condition to record. The rain explains the picture's look: the colors are soaked and lowered, edges are soft, and the surf beyond the boats is a blur of white rather than a drawn wave.

Monet at Étretat

Monet returned to Étretat several times between 1883 and 1886. In October 1885 the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, a major collector of his work, lent him a house in the village, and he stayed until December, painting the fishing fleet, the beach and the cliffs in all weathers. The arches of the Manneporte and the Porte d'Aval appear in many canvases of these years, as in Étretat, the Porte d'Aval: Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor. Here he turns his back on the famous rock formations and paints the fishermen's beach instead; an earlier, larger treatment of the same caloges is Fishing Boats and the Porte d'Aval in Cologne. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast gathers the whole campaign.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Art Institute of Chicago, which received it in 1947 with the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection. It hangs near the museum's other Normandy coast pictures, among them Cliff Walk at Pourville. More on Claude Monet.