Cliffs near Dieppe

Cliffs near Dieppe (La Falaise à Dieppe) was painted by Claude Monet in 1882, the year he spent long working stays on the Normandy coast at Pourville and Varengeville, just west of the port of Dieppe. The canvas, 66 by 82 centimeters and number 759 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Kunsthaus Zürich in Switzerland.

What you are looking at

Monet stands on the clifftop and looks along the edge toward the sea. A massive shoulder of chalk cliff, covered in rough grass and scrub, fills the left two-thirds of the picture and drops sheer at the right, where its white face is streaked with ochre, gray, blue and pink. A tumbledown fence runs along the brink. At the top left, on the skyline, two villas with red-tiled roofs stand near the edge, and a few tiny walkers in dark clothes stroll along the grassy path toward them.

To the right the sea opens out far below, pale green near the shore and fading to milky blue at the horizon. A single sailing boat sits out on the water, with others no more than specks in the haze. At the foot of the cliff a strip of beach in blue shadow is dotted with minuscule figures, so small they are only flicks of the brush, which is how Monet conveys the height. He signed the canvas at lower left.

How it was painted

The grassy slope is built from a dense mesh of short, multidirectional strokes of green, olive, rust and lilac, so the surface seems to move like wind in the grass. In the lower left, a patch of reddish earth breaks through, painted in warm, hatched strokes. The cliff face is handled with longer, vertical drags of paint, the white laid on thickly and catching the light, with blue and violet in the clefts. Against this rough texture the sea is smooth and almost weightless, laid in with thin horizontal strokes that let the pale ground glow through.

The contrast between the heavy land mass and the airy sea is the real subject. Monet sets the edge of the cliff almost on the diagonal of the canvas, so the picture is divided between solid and void, and the eye keeps sliding from one to the other. The villas and walkers at the top are a reminder that this coast was already a resort; Monet includes them, but at a scale that makes them look like toys perched on the edge of a geological mass.

Monet on the Normandy cliffs, 1882

After the death of Camille in 1879 and difficult years at Vétheuil, Monet went to Dieppe in February 1882. He found the town too urban and moved a few kilometers west to the fishing village of Pourville, where he stayed until mid-April, returning in June with Alice Hoschedé and the children for the summer. Over the year he painted the customs officer's cottage at Varengeville, the beaches and rocks at Pourville and the clifftop paths again and again. Its neighbor in the catalogue, W758, is the Art Institute of Chicago's Cliff Walk at Pourville; other works of the year include Rocks near Pourville at Ebb Tide and Beach in Pourville.

Three years later he would take the same approach to the arches at Étretat, as in The Cliffs at Étretat, and in 1897 he came back to paint the cliffs near Dieppe again, in softer, mistier pictures such as On the Cliff at Dieppe. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast follows all of these campaigns.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting belonged early on to the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure, one of Monet's most important collectors, and passed through the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and the Berlin collector Hugo Moses before the Vereinigung Zürcher Kunstfreunde, a society of Zürich art lovers, acquired it for the Kunsthaus in 1932. The Kunsthaus Zürich holds a strong group of Monets, including late water lily panels. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings. More on Claude Monet.