Edge of the Cliff at Pourville

Bord de la falaise à Pourville (Edge of the Cliff at Pourville) is a view by Claude Monet from the very rim of a cliff on the Normandy coast, looking across a hazy bay to the cliffs beyond. Signed and dated '82 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 752, it belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1956 until 2014, and is now in the Hasso Plattner Collection at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam.

What you're looking at

The lower half of the picture is the clifftop itself, a rounded mound of grass and wildflowers that swells up from the bottom edge and ends abruptly at the right, where a sliver of dark rock shows the cliff face dropping to the sea. The grass is painted in thick, multicolored strokes of yellow-green, ocher, rose and sage, with scattered red and orange poppies and, at the lower right, a few lilac and pink flowers.

Beyond the edge, there is nothing in between: the eye jumps straight to the sea, pale jade and blue-green, calm and hazy. Across the bay a long line of cliffs runs from the left toward the center, painted in soft greens, pinks and blue-grays with a pale strip of beach at their foot, fading as they recede. The sky is a milky, hazy blue-gray, almost without clouds, which merges into the sea at the horizon. The signature and date are at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

Monet spent much of 1882 at Pourville, a small resort west of Dieppe, and walked the cliffs above it daily. The Barberini's commentary points out that he did not seek out famous sights like the arches at Étretat, but chose a marginal, unspectacular motif, a grassy cliff edge, and gave it drama through perspective. The near ground is sharp and close, like a photograph taken from the edge, while the sea, sky and distant cliffs blur into haze. See Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

The two zones are handled completely differently. The grass is thick and tactile, built from short, crossing strokes that suggest the wind moving through it; the sea and far cliffs are thin, smooth and soft-edged. That difference in focus is what makes the drop feel steep: there is no middle ground to measure the distance, just near and far.

How it compares

Among the cliff pictures of 1882, Cliff Walk at Pourville in Chicago places two figures on a similar grassy edge, and Path in the Wheat Fields at Pourville in Denver leads down through fields to the bay. The Barberini canvas is the emptiest of them, with no figures, boats or buildings. For the hut on the next cliffs west, see Fisherman's Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville.

Hasso Plattner and the Barberini

The software entrepreneur Hasso Plattner built one of the largest private collections of Impressionist painting of recent decades and opened the Museum Barberini in Potsdam in 2017, in a reconstructed eighteenth-century palace. Since 2020 the museum has shown his Impressionist collection permanently, with dozens of Monets ranging from the 1860s to the late Giverny years. This canvas returned to Europe through that collection after more than a century in America.

Ownership and where to see it

According to the Barberini's provenance, the painting was probably bought from Monet by Durand-Ruel in December 1883, sold in 1886 to William H. Fuller of New York, and bought back by Durand-Ruel at Fuller's sale in 1903. It then belonged to Arthur B. Emmons of New York and Newport and his widow Julia, who bequeathed it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1956. The Met deaccessioned it at Sotheby's, New York, on 7 May 2014, and it entered the collection of Hasso Plattner, whose Impressionist paintings, including a large group of works by Monet, are shown at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. See where to see Monet's paintings.