Fishing Boats at Étretat

Claude Monet's Fishing Boats at Étretat (Barques de pêche à Étretat) was painted in 1885 on the beach of the Normandy fishing town during his long autumn stay there. Heavy wooden boats lie beached on the pebbles, masts down, while a rough sea pounds the shore behind them. The canvas, 73.7 by 91.4 centimeters (29 by 36 inches; Wildenstein 1028), is signed at lower left. It is in the Seattle Art Museum, the gift of Sarah Hart in 1992, and is the only painting by Monet in the museum's collection.

What you are looking at

The boats are the subject, and Monet brings us right in among them. Five or six hulls are drawn up on the shingle at different angles, their bows pointing toward the sea. In the center, a dark green boat with a gray deck carries a reddish net or sail draped over its gunwale. At left, a black hull with a bright vermilion bottom leans toward us. In the right foreground, two boats in olive and yellow-green crowd the edge of the canvas; one carries a registration number painted on its bow. Their masts and spars are laid down, crossing the picture in long diagonals that point back toward the waves.

Around them the beach is a litter of fishing gear: wooden props and posts, a capstan, ropes, all painted in quick, dark strokes on the pinkish-gray pebbles. Behind, the sea is in uproar. Breakers in green, turquoise and white roll in, and the spray rises in a pale wall against a gray sky. The Seattle Art Museum's record sums it up: stranded boats immobilized by a violent sea.

One detail repays a close look: the boats are not idle by chance. On a day like this nobody could launch, and the tilt of the hulls, propped on their sides, tells you the fleet is waiting out the weather.

Where and when

Étretat was both a fashionable resort and a working fishing village, and the boats on its beach fascinated Monet as much as the cliffs. He painted them in 1883 and again in the autumn of 1885, when he stayed on after a family holiday and worked until December in a house lent by the singer Jean-Baptiste Faure. The fishing fleet, the caloges (old boats turned upside down and roofed as sheds) and the capstans used to haul boats up the steep shingle all appear in his pictures of these months.

The Étretat boat pictures and how this version differs

Monet treated the beached fleet several times that autumn. Boats on the Beach at Étretat in the Art Institute of Chicago sets the boats beside thatched boat sheds, and Budapest's Three Fishing Boats narrows the view to three hulls; both also have a rough sea behind. The Departure of the Boats, Étretat shows the fleet putting out instead. The Seattle picture is the most crowded of the group: no cliff, almost no horizon, only a tangle of hulls, masts and gear pressed against breaking water.

The close, crowded viewpoint and the bold diagonals of the masts also show Monet's interest in Japanese prints, which he collected: the composition is cropped, asymmetrical and has no single focus.

How it was painted

The boats are painted with firm, opaque strokes and strong local colors: black, green, vermilion, olive, yellow. The sea is handled quite differently, in thick, curling, wet-in-wet strokes of white and green that convey the churning water. The beach is a mix of both, warm grays and pinks laid down quickly, with dark accents for the gear. The sky is a thin, smoky gray. The contrast between the solid, heavy boats and the restless water is the engine of the picture.

For the whole Étretat campaign and the rest of the coast, see Étretat and the Normandy Coast, and compare the calm of Manne-Porte, Étretat, painted the same autumn.

Where to see it

The painting was given to the Seattle Art Museum in 1992 by Sarah Hart, and it was the centerpiece of the museum's 2021 exhibition Monet at Étretat. For other public collections with Monet's work, see Where to See Monet's Paintings; for the painter, Claude Monet.