Rocks at Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île

Claude Monet's Rocks at Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île was painted in the autumn of 1886 on Belle-Île-en-Mer, the rugged island off the southern coast of Brittany. It shows the frieze of rocks and sea stacks that guard the inlet of Port-Goulphar, with sunlight breaking across the water between them. The canvas, 66 by 81.8 centimeters (Wildenstein 1095), is inscribed "Claude Monet 86" at lower right. It is in the Art Institute of Chicago, where it hangs in the Impressionist galleries.

What you are looking at

Monet looks down into a narrow channel from the cliff above. Massive rocks crowd in from both sides: a dark, layered headland at left, a big rounded block in the center, and a tall, ruddy wall at right. Between them, the sea opens out toward a pale horizon, glimpsed in two small gaps at the top of the canvas. Further back, low dark cliffs close the view on each side.

The rocks are painted in rust, brick red, violet and deep blue, with patches of green where turf and lichen cling to their tops. They look heavy and wet. Below them, the water fills the lower half of the canvas, and it is anything but uniform: deep bottle green and blue in the shadow of the rocks, then a broad band of light, broken into hundreds of short white, lilac and pale blue strokes, where the sun hits the surface. The sky is a soft, cloudy gray-white with a few patches of blue.

The thing to notice is the path of light on the water. It runs diagonally from the lower left up toward the central rock, and it is painted almost like a pattern, in small separate marks. It turns the sea into a shimmering surface that contrasts with the dense, matte rocks.

Where and when

Monet arrived on Belle-Île in September 1886, intending to stay a couple of weeks. He stayed more than two months, lodging in the tiny hamlet of Kervilahouen a short walk from the coast, and worked in wind and rain on the island's "wild coast," the Côte Sauvage. The Art Institute quotes him calling the place lugubrious, terrifying and very beautiful, all at once. He painted around forty canvases of the rocks at Port-Coton, Port-Domois and Port-Goulphar, and this is one of a group showing the Port-Goulphar formations.

Belle-Île marked a change in his work. After the warm color of Bordighera and the chalk white of Étretat, the dark granite and violent Atlantic pushed him toward denser, darker, more somber pictures, and toward working on the same motif again and again under changing conditions.

How this version differs

Many of the Belle-Île canvases are about storm and spray, like the Musée d'Orsay's The Rocks of Belle-Île, Rough Sea and Storm off Belle-Île. Others, such as the Pushkin Museum's The Pyramides at Port-Coton and the Fitzwilliam's Rocks at Port-Coton, the Lion Rock, focus on single offshore needles. The Chicago picture is calmer and more enclosed: a sheltered inlet on a bright, broken day, where the sea glitters instead of boiling. The rocks surround the viewer instead of standing apart.

How it was painted

The rocks are built up with long, dragged, overlapping strokes in a dense weave of reds, violets and blues, laid over darker underlayers. The water is handled in the opposite way, with short, discrete strokes of pure color set side by side so that they mix in the eye. The sky is thin and lightly brushed. The surface is heavily worked overall, a sign of the repeated sessions Monet spent on each canvas, often finishing them later in the studio at Giverny.

Ownership and where to see it

Monet sold the painting to Durand-Ruel in 1892. It went to his New York branch and was bought in 1897 by Mrs. Harriet Borland of Chicago, one of the city's early Monet collectors. Her son Chauncey B. Borland and his wife gave it to the Art Institute in stages from 1964, completing the gift in 1973. For the Art Institute's other Monets, including the Stacks of Wheat, see Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago; for the painter, Claude Monet.