Rocks at Port-Coton, the Lion Rock, Belle-Île

Claude Monet's Rocks at Port-Coton, the Lion Rock was painted in the autumn of 1886 on Belle-Île-en-Mer, the Atlantic island off the southern coast of Brittany. A dark headland juts in from the left, and out in the foaming sea crouches a rock whose silhouette suggests a resting lion. The canvas, 65.4 by 81.2 centimeters (Wildenstein 1091), is signed and dated "Claude Monet 86" at lower right. It has been in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge since 1998.

What you are looking at

The left third of the picture is rock: a sheer, flat-topped cliff and, in front of it, a lower, broken mass running down to the water. Monet paints them not in gray but in an extraordinary weave of dark red, rust, cobalt and ultramarine, with a few touches of ocher where the light catches a ledge. They read as wet, heavy and almost black from a distance; up close they are full of color.

In the middle distance, slightly right of center, sits the Lion Rock, a rounded hump with a raised "head" at its top, surrounded by smaller outcrops. Around it the sea is in constant motion: a rough expanse of green, turquoise and blue, broken everywhere by white foam. Waves wash over the low rocks at lower right and swirl at the foot of the cliff. A strip of deeper blue runs along the horizon, under a heavy, pale gray sky streaked with cream.

The image works through contrast. The rocks are solid, dark and warm; the sea is light, cool and fragmented. Even the strokes are different: long and curving on the rocks, short and choppy on the water.

Where and when

Monet arrived on Belle-Île in September 1886 expecting to stay about ten days. He stayed ten weeks, based in a tiny hamlet only a few hundred meters from the coast, and painted thirty-nine canvases there, according to the Fitzwilliam. He worked through gales and rain on the Côte Sauvage, the island's wild Atlantic coast, often returning to the same rocks again and again as the weather changed. Port-Coton is famous for its needles, the Aiguilles, and the Lion Rock is one of the smaller formations nearby.

The novelist Octave Mirbeau, who was on the island at the same time, became a close friend and later one of Monet's most eloquent champions. The Fitzwilliam's own teaching materials link his habit of repeating a motif to the Japanese prints he collected, which often show one place in many moods.

How this version differs

Among the Belle-Île pictures, the needles of Port-Coton appear in several famous canvases, including The Pyramides at Port-Coton in the Pushkin Museum and The Rocks of Belle-Île, Rough Sea in the Musée d'Orsay. The Fitzwilliam's picture isolates a lesser-known formation, the Lion, and pairs it with the near headland, so that the composition is split between a dark mass at left and open, foaming water at right. The weather is gray and overcast rather than stormy or sunlit, and the drama comes from the sea's surface rather than from spray or sky. Compare the bright, glittering inlet of Rocks at Port-Goulphar in Chicago, painted a few weeks apart.

How it was painted

The paint is thick and heavily worked. Monet built up the rocks with layer upon layer of dragged color, so that the surface becomes as rough as the stone. In the sea, he used quick, curling strokes of green and white, some laid wet into wet, others added on top as dry, broken touches of foam. The sky is painted more freely, with loose horizontal sweeps. Many of the Belle-Île canvases were reworked in the studio at Giverny before he released them, and the density of this surface suggests repeated sessions.

Belle-Île falls outside our Normandy hub, but for Monet's other sea cliffs, from Étretat to Pourville, see Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

Where to see it

The painting was accepted by the British government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1998. The museum uses it widely in its school programs, and a children's story about a horse and a lion has been written around it. See also Where to See Monet's Paintings and Claude Monet.