The Hôtel des Roches Noires, Trouville

The Hôtel des Roches Noires, Trouville is a painting by Claude Monet of the promenade in front of a luxury seaside hotel on the Normandy coast, made in the summer of 1870 while he was on honeymoon with Camille Doncieux. The upright canvas, about 81 by 58.5 centimeters, is signed and dated at lower right and is number 155 in Wildenstein's catalogue. It belongs to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (RF 1947 30).

What does the Hôtel des Roches Noires painting show?

The hotel fills the right side of the canvas, a cream and yellow facade blazing in full sun, with balconies, tall windows, a mansard roof and ornate finials against the sky. Guests lean over the upper balconies, and a broad flight of steps descends from the terrace to the boardwalk.

The left half is wind. A tall white pole runs up the left edge, and from it a huge flag of red and white stripes streams out across the upper corner, painted in a few long, broken strokes. It is generally read as the American Stars and Stripes, though Monet shows no blue field of stars, only rippling bands. Further off, smaller flags fly from two poles, the upper one the French tricolor, while white clouds race across a deep blue sky.

On the promenade below, the summer crowd is sketched in touches of white, black and gray. A white awning shades a group at center. At lower left, a woman in a deckchair is cut off by the frame, a parasol and a lamp post beside her. Near the steps, a man in a straw hat strides toward us with a cane, and a bed of red flowers lines the hotel's garden at right.

How Monet painted the wind

Look at the big flag up close and it barely exists as an object: a few dragged strokes of red over white and blue, the edges left ragged so the cloth seems to snap and twist. The clouds are painted the same way, wet into wet. The facade, by contrast, is built with firmer, heavier paint and crisp shadows, so the stone feels solid against the moving air.

The composition rests on a strong diagonal. The hotel front runs sharply back into depth from the right edge, while the flagpoles and lamp posts stand vertical, a device Monet had already tried at the seaside in Garden at Sainte-Adresse, with its own pair of flags. The light falls from the left, throwing the boardwalk into a long, cool shadow at lower right and leaving the facade almost white with sun.

The summer of 1870 at Trouville

Monet married Camille on 28 June 1870 in Paris, with Gustave Courbet as a witness, and the couple went to Trouville, the fashionable resort at the mouth of the Touques, with their young son Jean. The Hôtel des Roches Noires, opened in 1866, was the grandest address on the seafront. The Monets lodged at a more modest hotel, and he painted this one from the promenade, the public side of resort life.

That summer he made a small group of beach and boardwalk pictures, including The Beach at Trouville and Camille on the Beach in Trouville, often with Eugène Boudin painting nearby. France declared war on Prussia on 19 July. By the autumn Monet had left for London to avoid the fighting, and the Second Empire whose holiday crowd this picture records had fallen.

How it fits Monet's Normandy pictures

The Normandy coast was Monet's home ground: he grew up in Le Havre and painted Sainte-Adresse, Honfleur and Trouville throughout the 1860s, and later Étretat and Pourville. Among the Trouville pictures, this is the most urban and the most vertical, closer to his Paris street views than to the beach scenes. Compare it with the low, gray harbor view of Landing Stage at Trouville, Low Tide, and see the whole coast in our Étretat and the Normandy Coast hub.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. It was given to the French national museums in 1947 by Jacques Laroche, who kept a life interest, and it entered the collection physically in 1976. Our Monet at the Musée d'Orsay guide lists the museum's other Monets, and his life is told on our Claude Monet page.