Fishing Boats and the Porte d'Aval

Claude Monet's Fishing Boats, catalogued as Fishing Boats and the Porte d'Aval and in French as Falaises et barques à Étretat (Wildenstein 822), is a large view of the beach at Étretat on the Normandy coast, signed and dated 1884 at lower right. The canvas, about 73 by 100 centimeters, is in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne, Germany (inventory WRM 3120), which acquired it in 1961.

What you are looking at

The foreground is a crowded strip of shingle. Fishing boats are drawn up above the waterline: dark hulls in black and brown, one with a green stripe at the left, and at the right a boat with a bright rust-red hull, their masts leaning at different angles. Among them squat caloges, old boats turned upside down and roofed with thatch or planks to serve as fishermen's sheds; two in the center, one with a ridged plank roof, form the heaviest shapes in the picture. A few tiny figures stand by the boats at the right, and a dark figure leans in a doorway at the far left.

Behind the beach the Channel is in turmoil. Long rollers of gray-green water, flecked with white foam, break across the middle of the canvas, and their curling crests are drawn with quick, hooked strokes. At the upper left, rising out of the spray, stands the Porte d'Aval, the famous chalk arch at the western end of the bay, its rock brown and gray in the dull light. The sky is low and pale, a cream-gray almost the same tone as the cliff.

How it was painted

The canvas is large and the handling vigorous. Monet builds the waves from short, curving strokes of white over darker green, so they seem to curl and break, and treats the boats and sheds as bold, simple shapes in dark paint. The thatched roofs are dragged in with long, dry, ochre strokes that look like straw; the plank roof is drawn with a series of parallel lines. The solid base of hulls and sheds lets the restless sea read more strongly above it.

The color is restrained: browns, blacks, gray-greens and cream, with a single strong accent in the red hull. That one warm note, set at the right, balances the mass of the cliff at the upper left, and the composition swings between them along the diagonal of the beach.

Étretat, a working beach

Monet first painted Étretat in 1868–69 and returned repeatedly between 1883 and 1886. The village was a fashionable resort, but Monet was drawn as much to its fishing community as to its cliffs. The same mix of caloges and boats appears in Boats on the Beach at Étretat, painted from a hotel window in November 1885 and now in Chicago, and the fleet at sea is the subject of Étretat, the Porte d'Aval: Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor in Dijon and The Departure of the Boats, Étretat. The sea here is close to his storm pictures, such as Rough Sea at Étretat in Lyon. Our hub on Étretat and the Normandy coast follows all of these campaigns.

Compared with those later canvases, this one keeps more of the documentary feel of a harbor picture: the boats, sheds and fishermen are all described, and the cliff serves as a landmark rather than as the subject. Within two years Monet would be painting the cliffs alone, without people, as pure masses of light and color. The canvas also records the everyday equipment of a fishing beach, the sheds, hulls, masts and tackle, with the care of someone who had grown up among boats on this coast at Le Havre.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne, which has a strong collection of French Impressionism. For other collections, see where to see Monet's paintings. Other boat pictures include Three Fishing Boats in Budapest. More on Claude Monet.