Fisherman's Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville

Fisherman's Cottage on the Cliffs at Varengeville is the best-known of Claude Monet's 1882 paintings of the small stone hut on the Normandy cliffs west of Dieppe, and the sunniest. Catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 805, it was bought from Durand-Ruel in 1890 by the Boston collector Anna Perkins Rogers, shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1891, and bequeathed to the museum in 1921.

What you're looking at

The hut sits in the upper left, its pale stone walls and coral-red roof with two chimneys catching full sun. But it is half-swallowed by vegetation. The whole lower two-thirds of the canvas is a billowing mass of shrubs and wildflowers on the slope of the cliff, painted in short, thick, multicolored strokes: yellow-green, olive, emerald, lilac and pink, with touches of red and orange flowers at the bottom edge. The bushes swell up and over the edge of the cliff toward the right, where the slope falls away out of sight.

Beyond, the sea fills the upper right of the picture, a strong jade and turquoise, worked in short horizontal strokes, deeper blue toward the horizon. It is crowded with small white sails, fishing boats or yachts, scattered across the water to the horizon. The sky is a pale blue with soft white and pinkish clouds. The signature is at lower right.

The cottage and the summer of 1882

The little building had been put up as a lookout for customs officers watching for smugglers along the coast; by Monet's day fishermen used it to store their nets. Monet painted it again and again during his long stay at Pourville in 1882, from the clifftop, from below, in sun and in cloud, in more than a dozen canvases. This view from slightly above, with the sea behind and the vegetation in front, is the one that best combines the three elements he cared about: the man-made block of the hut, the textured growth of the cliff, and the shimmering water. See Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

The surface is dense and tactile. The shrubs are painted in a dense web of small strokes, each of a different color, laid side by side and over each other, so that the slope seems to vibrate. The sea is smoother and cooler, and the sails are single flicks of white. Monet sets the warm hut against the cool sea and lets the mass of greenery fill the space between them, with no foreground path or figure to anchor the viewer.

How this version differs

Of the canvases of the hut, The Customs House, Afternoon Effect, owned by the Musée d'Orsay, looks down on it from higher up, so that the pale sea fills the picture; The Fisherman's House, Overcast Weather shows it from down the slope under a heavy gray sky. The Boston picture is the brightest and most crowded with life, with flowers in front and sails behind. Compare also Edge of the Cliff at Pourville, painted nearby.

Boston and Monet

Boston collectors were among the first in America to buy Monet, and by the 1890s the city was one of the main centers of American Monet collecting. Anna Perkins Rogers, who bought this canvas in 1890, was part of a circle of Boston women collectors, many of whom later gave their pictures to the MFA. The museum now holds one of the largest collections of Monet's work outside France.

Ownership and where to see it

The MFA's records note that Monet probably sold the picture to Durand-Ruel in October 1882; it passed through the Porto-Riche sale in 1890 and was sold by Durand-Ruel on 4 July 1890 to Anna Perkins Rogers of Boston, an early American collector of Monet. She lent it to the MFA in 1891, one of the first Monets shown there, and it entered the collection with her bequest in 1921 (accession 21.1331). See Monet at the MFA Boston.