Garden at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet painted Garden at Sainte-Adresse in the summer of 1867 at the seaside town just outside Le Havre where his family spent their summers. The canvas, 98.1 by 129.9 centimeters and catalogued by Daniel Wildenstein as W 95, has belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1967. It is also known as Terrace at Sainte-Adresse, and Monet himself called it, in a letter, his "Chinese painting with flags."

What you are looking at

The picture is built in three horizontal bands. At the bottom is a garden terrace laid with pale gravel and edged with flowers: red geraniums in a round bed at center, nasturtiums spilling over the lower edge, and tall spikes of orange-red gladioli at both sides. In the middle is the sea, a hard green-blue, choppy with small waves. At the top is a broad sky, blue at the zenith and banked lower down with gray and white cloud.

Two flagpoles cut the composition vertically into thirds. On the right flies the French tricolor; on the left, a red-and-yellow flag. Both snap stiffly toward the right in a wind from the sea, and Monet paints them almost flat, as blocks of pure color with very little modeling.

The people are as still as the flags are restless. At lower right an older man in a panama hat sits in a wicker chair, facing the water with his back half turned to us; he is generally identified as the painter's father, Adolphe Monet. In front of him, a woman is almost completely hidden by a white parasol.

At the rail, a young woman in white with a yellow parasol talks with a man in a dark suit and top hat. They are usually taken to be relatives, including Monet's cousin, although the identifications are traditional rather than documented. No one looks at anyone else, and two of the four wicker chairs are empty.

Now look at the horizon. It is crowded: dozens of sailing boats at left, and a line of steamships at right, each trailing a small plume of dark smoke. Le Havre was one of the busiest ports in France, and Monet records the traffic of modern shipping as carefully as the flowers. A single fishing boat with brown sails crosses close in, just above the rail, and gives the eye a middle step between terrace and horizon.

How it was painted

Monet set his easel at an upper window, so the terrace tips toward us and the horizon sits high. Combined with the flat, saturated color and the grid made by flagpoles and horizon line, this produces a pattern that reminded contemporaries of Japanese color woodblock prints, then becoming fashionable in Paris. Scholars often compare it with Hokusai's prints of figures on a terrace above the sea. Monet later collected such prints in quantity, and his phrase "Chinese painting" reflects the loose way the French of the 1860s used the word for anything East Asian.

The handling varies across the canvas. The flowers are dabbed in thick, separate touches of unmixed red and orange. The sea is laid in with smaller, choppier strokes of blue and green. The shadows of the chairs fall on the gravel as clean violet-gray shapes, an early example of Monet's habit of making shadows colored rather than brown.

The story behind the summer

The sunny calm hides a difficult year. In 1867 Monet was out of money, and his family pressed him to leave his companion, Camille Doncieux, who was pregnant in Paris with their son Jean. He spent the summer at Sainte-Adresse with his family, under their supervision, painting the comfortable bourgeois world he depended on. The same summer produced Regatta at Sainte-Adresse and The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, both views of the same stretch of shore, and he had painted the flowering garden of the area in Garden in Bloom at Sainte-Adresse a little earlier. All belong to the stretch of coast covered on our Normandy coast hub.

Compare the picture with Women in the Garden, painted in 1866–67 in a suburban garden near Paris: the same white dresses and dark suits, the same flower beds, but here the figures are smaller and the light and the sea take over.

Ownership and reception

Monet showed the canvas at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879. It later passed into American hands; the Pennsylvania collector Theodore Pitcairn owned it from 1926 until 1967, when it was sold at auction in London and bought by the Metropolitan Museum for a price that made headlines at the time. It is now one of the best-known early works by Claude Monet in the United States.

Where to see it

The painting hangs in the Met's nineteenth-century European galleries (Gallery 818 at the time of writing), accession number 67.241. See our guide to Monet at the Met for the museum's other Monets.