La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide

La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide is the large Normandy beach scene with which Claude Monet, aged 24, made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1865. The canvas, 90.2 by 150.5 centimeters and signed and dated 1865 at lower right, shows the shore at Sainte-Adresse, just north of Le Havre, under a heavy sky. It is in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and is number 52 in Wildenstein's catalogue.

What does La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide show?

We stand on a wet beach at low tide, looking along the shore toward the headland of La Hève, which rises at right as a long, crumbling cliff of ochre, tan and gray-green, its face streaked where the soil has slipped. The beach narrows toward the foot of the cliff, and a line of wooden groynes, the low fences built to hold the shingle in place, runs from the right edge toward the sea. A rowing boat lies upturned on the stones, and a tall pole leans against the cliff.

The foreground is the finest passage. The sand is so wet that it mirrors the sky, a broad sheet of gray-violet broken by a few dark rocks, the curving lines of water draining back toward the sea, and the reflections of the figures. To the right the beach turns to shingle, painted as hundreds of small pale and dark touches, with stumps of old posts sticking up.

The life of the beach is all work, not leisure. At left a two-wheeled cart, driven by a seated man, stands in the shallow surf, probably gathering seaweed or sand. At center two pale horses wait with a figure partly hidden behind them, and a man in dark clothes walks toward us with a stick. Far out at the left, a single sailing boat leans on the horizon.

More than half the canvas is sky. Monet paints a stormy, moving cover of dark slate-gray cloud, opening low down into heaps of white cumulus and a band of pale blue, with a brighter break near the top. The sea at left churns in white and gray-green, its breaking waves laid in with thick, pale paint.

Where and when was it painted?

Monet grew up in Le Havre, and the beaches at Sainte-Adresse were the landscape of his youth. In the summer of 1864 he worked along this coast and at Honfleur, across the Seine estuary, making studies outdoors. One of them, La Pointe de la Hève, Sainte-Adresse, now in the National Gallery in London, shows the same groynes and headland on a smaller scale and is generally regarded as the study for this picture. Monet then worked up the large version in Paris that winter for the Salon jury.

He sent two seascapes to the Salon of 1865, this one and The Mouth of the Seine at Honfleur, now in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. Both were accepted and well reviewed; critics noted their boldness and their truth to nature. It was a promising start, and it encouraged Monet to attempt a far more ambitious Salon picture the next year, the huge Luncheon on the Grass, which he never finished.

How was it painted?

This is a studio picture made from outdoor studies, as Salon practice expected, and it shows the painters Monet had learned from. Eugène Boudin, who first took the teenage Monet to paint outdoors around Le Havre, gave him the low horizon, the big sky and the small working figures. The Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, whom Monet met on this coast in 1862, taught him to look at wet reflections and to keep a sky moving. The dark, earthy palette and the thick, solid handling of the cliff owe something to Gustave Courbet.

The composition is built on a long diagonal: cliff, groynes and the edge of the shingle all slide from upper right toward the sea at left, where the open horizon releases the eye. The figures sit on the hinge between land and water. Monet's handling is still blended and tonal in the sky, but in the pebbles and the white surf you can see the short, separate touches that would later take over his whole surface.

How it fits Monet's coast pictures

The painting stands at the start of a lifetime of work on the Normandy coast. Two summers later, painting in the same town, he lightened his palette and moved to the bright, flat light of The Beach at Sainte-Adresse and Regatta at Sainte-Adresse. Set beside those, this picture shows a young painter already absorbed by weather and wet light but still working in the earth tones of Realist landscape.

Where is La Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide today?

The painting is in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which acquired it in 1968 (AP 1968.07). It hangs with the museum's European paintings when not on loan. For other museums with Monet's work, see where to see Monet's paintings, and for his life as a whole, Claude Monet.