Cliff Walk at Pourville

Claude Monet's Cliff Walk at Pourville was painted in 1882 at Pourville, a small seaside village just west of Dieppe on the Normandy coast. The canvas, 66.5 by 82.3 centimeters and number 758 in Wildenstein's catalogue, is in the Art Institute of Chicago, which received it in 1933 with the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.

What you are looking at

Two young women stand on the grassy brow of a cliff, small against a huge expanse of sea and sky. One holds an orange-red parasol tilted into the wind; the other, in a straw hat and a pale dress, stands a step ahead of her at the edge. They are so lightly painted that their dresses almost merge with the grass, but the parasol catches the eye at once, the hottest color in the picture.

The ground rises from the lower edge as a hummock of grass and scrub, painted in a restless tangle of green, ochre, pink and violet strokes that seem to bend in the wind. Just left of center, a block of cliff juts out over the sea, its face in dark shadow. At the right edge a darker rocky headland closes the view. Beyond the women the sea stretches to a high horizon, a choppy surface of turquoise, jade and dark green flecked with white, dotted with a whole fleet of small white sailing boats. Above, white clouds tumble across a bright blue sky. The signature and date are at lower right.

How it was painted

Everything here is about wind. The grass strokes go in every direction, the clouds are dragged across the sky in curling strokes, and the sea is broken into short, jittery dashes of color. Monet paints the women almost transparently, with the same strokes and colors as the grass around them, so they become part of the weather rather than portraits.

This was a problem Monet set himself deliberately: how to put figures into a landscape without breaking the unity of the painted surface. His answer is texture and color. Grass, dresses and parasol are all made of the same restless touches, and the warm pinks and oranges of the figures reappear in the grass at their feet. The high viewpoint, with the edge of the cliff dropping out of sight, adds a sense of vertigo. Notice too how many boats there are: a scattered fleet of white sails runs right across the horizon band, each one a single dab of paint. They multiply the sense of distance and movement, and they tell us this is a fair, breezy day on a working coast.

Pourville, 1882

In February 1882 Monet went to Normandy to paint, partly as a retreat. Camille had died three years earlier, he was living with Alice Hoschedé and her children, France was in recession, and divisions within the Impressionist group were sharp; he left his contribution to the seventh Impressionist exhibition that spring to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Finding Dieppe too urban, he settled at Pourville and stayed until mid-April. In June Alice and the children joined him, and the two young women here are probably Marthe and Blanche, the eldest Hoschedé daughters.

Over the year he produced close to a hundred canvases on this stretch of coast: beaches, cliffs, the customs officer's cottage at Varengeville and the church on the cliff. Its catalogue neighbor is the Kunsthaus Zürich's Cliffs near Dieppe; other works include Rocks near Pourville at Ebb Tide and Beach in Pourville. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast follows his whole career on the Channel.

Monet had painted women on a windy height before, and he would again: compare the figure with the parasol in Woman with a Parasol of 1875 and Woman with a Parasol, Facing Left of 1886.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, usually in the Impressionist galleries alongside Bordighera and The Beach at Sainte-Adresse. More on Claude Monet.