The Fisherman's House, Overcast Weather

La Maison du pêcheur, temps couvert (The Fisherman's House, Overcast Weather) is one of Claude Monet's 1882 views of the small stone hut on the cliffs near Varengeville, west of Dieppe, painted under a gray, cloudy sky. Signed and dated '82 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 734, it is in a private collection and is rarely exhibited.

What you're looking at

The composition is built on a steep diagonal. A great slope of clifftop scrub rises from the lower right to the upper left, filling half the canvas with a dense texture of heather, gorse and grass: dabs of mauve, rust, olive, sage and dull pink, with pale strokes for the sandy path in the foreground. Near the top of the slope, just left of center, sits the hut, small and solid, its red-tiled roof and chimney catching what light there is, with a rough wooden fence running down from it toward the right.

Beyond the slope the sea opens out, pale jade and gray-green, flat and calm, running to a straight horizon. A few small white sails dot it, the largest at the right. Near the lower right, the edge of the cliff drops away sharply. The sky is a heavy, low ceiling of gray and lilac cloud brushed in short, broken strokes, with a faint pink cast near the horizon. The signature and date are at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

In 1882 Monet spent much of the year at Pourville, on the coast just west of Dieppe, painting the beach, the cliffs and the countryside toward Varengeville. The hut on the cliffs, built as a lookout for customs officers and later used by fishermen to store their nets, became one of his favorite motifs: he painted it more than a dozen times, from different sides and in different light. Here he looks at it from down the slope, so the hut is small and high and the scrub takes over. See Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

The hillside is painted in a thick, varied texture of short, multidirectional strokes, each a different color, so that at a distance they merge into the warm brown-violet of heath. The sea, by contrast, is smooth and cool, laid in with long horizontal strokes. That contrast between the busy foreground and the calm distance carries the picture, and the overcast light lets Monet concentrate on color rather than on cast shadows.

How this version differs

Set beside its siblings, this is one of the most earthbound views of the hut. In The Customs House, Afternoon Effect Monet looks down on the hut from above and the sea fills the canvas; in Fisherman's Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville in Boston, the hut sinks into bright flowering shrubs in sunshine. Here the weather is gray, the slope dominates and the hut is a small, distant shape. Compare also the same year's Church at Varengeville, Grey Weather, another overcast cliff view.

A first series

The customs-house paintings are often described as a first step toward Monet's later series. They are not yet a series in the strict sense, since the viewpoint and composition change from canvas to canvas, but they show him returning to one modest building again and again and letting weather, season and angle create the differences. Ten years later the same habit would produce the Haystacks and Rouen Cathedral. See the Haystacks.

Where to see it

The painting is in a private collection and is not on public view. Other customs-house canvases can be seen in Boston and, from the Orsay's collection, in Bordeaux. For museums with works by Monet, see where to see Monet's paintings.