Rue de la Bavolle, Honfleur

What you are looking at

A cobbled street climbs gently away from us between tall old houses. The left side is in deep shade, a dark run of timbered and slate-hung façades with jutting upper stories, a lamp bracket and a woman in a white cap standing in a doorway. The right side catches full afternoon sun: a buttery stucco house with tall green-grey shutters and a painted shop sign reading "DENRÉES C…", the start of denrées coloniales, the old French name for a grocer selling coffee, sugar and spices. Beyond it a brown timbered house is wrapped in a climbing vine, and further up the street small figures cluster by the shop doors and sit on the steps.

In the middle of the road a woman in a long dark skirt and a boy in a white shirt and cap carry a large shallow basket between them, casting short, sharp shadows on the sunlit ground. A pale blue sky with soft white clouds opens above the roofs, and at the far end of the street a jumble of gables and chimneys closes the view.

The picture is built on a single bold idea: a diagonal edge of shadow that cuts the street in two. Monet paints the shade in cool browns, slate and grey, and the sun in creams and ochers, with almost no transition, and lets that contrast do the work of drawing. Look at the gutter running down the left side of the street: a thin streak of light on wet stone, the one bright line in the shadowed half.

Honfleur, 1864

The Rue de la Bavolle is one of the old streets of Honfleur, the harbor town on the Seine estuary opposite Le Havre, where Monet grew up. Honfleur belongs to the stretch of coast covered in our Normandy coast hub. In the summer and autumn of 1864 Monet stayed in and around the town, painting with Eugène Boudin and the Dutch landscapist Johan Barthold Jongkind and lodging at the Saint-Siméon farm above it. He was 23 and still largely unknown, though he would make his Salon debut the following year with two seascapes.

He painted this street twice. A second version, similar in size and composition, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Mannheim picture, signed "Claude Monet" at lower right, has the crisper shadow and the more developed figures.

How it was painted

The canvas is almost square, 58 by 63 centimeters, an unusual shape for Monet that suits the deep, narrow street. The paint is applied in broad, flat areas with a loaded brush: whole façades are a single tone, modulated only by a few darker strokes for windows and beams. The figures are economical silhouettes. This flat, blocky handling owes something to Gustave Courbet and to Édouard Manet's recent work, and it is quite different from the broken touch Monet would develop by the end of the decade.

Honfleur in Monet's early work

The same year and the years that followed produced other Honfleur pictures: harbor views like Fishing Boats in Honfleur, the beach in The Beach at Honfleur, and the winter roads of 1867 in A Cart on the Snowy Road at Honfleur and Road by Saint-Siméon Farm in Winter. Together they show Claude Monet learning his trade on home ground.

Meaning and style

Nothing much happens in the picture, and that is its point. Monet records an ordinary street at a particular hour, with people going about their errands, the way a photographer of the period might. The bold division of light and shade, and the insistence on the effect of sunlight over the description of buildings, already point toward the concerns of the 1870s.

Where to see it

This version is in the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany, one of several German museums that collected French Impressionism early. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.