Steep Cliffs near Dieppe

What you are looking at

From high on a clifftop we look along the Normandy coast. In the lower right foreground a great rounded mass of cliff, covered in grass and scrub, drops steeply toward the sea; behind it a second headland steps down, and beyond that a long, pale promontory reaches out into the water in the distance. On the left the sea is a wide, flat expanse of milky grey-blue, scattered with a few tiny flecks that may be boats or gulls. The sky is overcast, a soft layer of grey cloud warmed with pink and yellow toward the horizon.

The palette is narrow and delicate: mauve, rose, grey-green and lilac on the cliffs, pearl and blue in the sea and sky. The light is that of a dull late afternoon or evening, when the sun is behind cloud and colors flatten into a single tone.

The detail most people miss is the shape of the composition. The cliffs are pushed into the lower right corner and cut by the frame, and their dark mass is balanced against a huge, almost empty space of sea and sky. It is an arrangement Monet learned from Japanese prints and used throughout his coast paintings.

Where and when it was painted

In the winter of 1896–97 Monet returned to the coast west of Dieppe, where he had worked in 1882. He arrived at Pourville in mid-January 1897 and was still there in early April, painting the cliffs and the gorges that cut through them in many states of weather. In early April he wrote to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel that he was working hard despite bad weather. Like the Mornings on the Seine he painted the same year, the cliff pictures of 1897 return to motifs of his past but treat them more softly, as studies in atmosphere.

A closely related canvas from the same campaign, Sur la falaise de Dieppe, entered the Musée d'Orsay in 2023. For his first Dieppe and Pourville pictures of 1882, compare Cliffs near Dieppe in Zurich and Cliff Walk at Pourville in Chicago. For the coast as a whole, see Étretat and the Normandy coast.

How it was painted

The canvas is wide, 65 by 100.5 centimeters, a format that stretches the view along the coast. Monet built the cliffs with layers of small, dense strokes in close-valued colors, so that the slope seems covered in a soft pelt of grass. The sea and sky are thinner and smoother, the two almost merging at the horizon. Signed and dated at lower right, the picture has the uniform, enveloping tonality of his work of the later 1890s. A drawing of a similar view is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

Compared with the vivid, windy cliffs of 1882, the 1897 pictures are quieter and more decorative. The subject is less the geology of the coast than a single, unified mood of light, and that interest links them directly to the Arm of the Seine near Giverny series painted that summer.

The return to Pourville had a personal side too. Monet had first worked there in 1882 with Alice Hoschedé and the children, and coming back fifteen years later, now an established and prosperous painter, he revisited the same paths and viewpoints. He wrote to Alice almost daily, and his letters track the weather, the light and his frustration with both.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting was exhibited with other Normandy landscapes at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1898. Durand-Ruel acquired it in 1901 and sold it in 1903 to the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin. After the revolution his collection passed to the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow, and in 1948, when that museum was closed, this picture went to the Hermitage (inventory ГЭ-8992). It was lent to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for the Shchukin exhibition of 2016–17. See where to see Monet's paintings and the Claude Monet page.