Stormy Sea

What you are looking at

There is no beach, no boat and no cliff in this picture, only water and air. Monet sets the horizon a little above the middle of the canvas and fills everything below it with surf. Rows of breaking waves stack up toward us, each one a band of churned cream, ocher and grey laid over darker blue-green troughs. Near the horizon a thin strip of darker green-blue water marks the open sea, beyond the breakers. Above, a slate-blue sky is broken by small, quickly painted clouds, puffs of white and apricot catching a light that never reaches the sea.

The brushwork changes with the motion it describes. In the sky the strokes are short dabs and commas, set at a slight diagonal as if pushed by the wind. In the sea they become long, curling horizontals, loaded with thick pale paint where the waves break, so the foam stands up from the canvas as real texture. Look at the dark line of the horizon: it is ruled almost straight, the one calm element in the picture, and it makes the turbulence below feel heavier.

The foam is not white. Monet paints it in warm creams and yellowish ochers, the color of surf churned up with sand in shallow water, and sets it against cold blue shadows in the troughs. That warm-cold contrast is what makes the sea seem to move. His signature sits low at the right, painted in dark blue, almost lost in the spray.

The Channel coast in the early 1880s

After the death of his first wife, Camille, in 1879, Monet spent long stretches of the early 1880s on the Channel coast, at Fécamp, Pourville, Varengeville and Étretat, the coastline gathered in our Normandy coast hub. He painted the sea from clifftops and beaches in all weathers, often working on several canvases at once and switching as the light changed. The National Gallery of Canada dates this picture to the early 1880s, and its Wildenstein number places it among the seascapes he painted on that coast at the start of the decade; the exact spot is not recorded.

How it was painted

The canvas is a standard size, about 60 by 74 centimeters, of the kind Monet carried along the cliffs. The sea was laid in with long, horizontal strokes of blue and green, and the breaking waves were added on top in thick, curving ribbons of pale paint, often with a single movement of the brush. The sky was painted quickly and thinly by comparison. It is the kind of picture that could be done in a few sessions, on the spot, in the wind. Step back and the separate strokes merge into rolling lines of surf; step close and they become a dense, almost abstract weave of paint.

A sea without landmarks

Pictures like this one, with nothing to anchor the eye but the horizon, are among Monet's most radical of those years. Compare Waves Breaking of 1881 in San Francisco, another canvas given over to surf, and the cliff-framed seas of Rough Sea at Étretat and The Manneporte, Étretat. They look ahead to the stripped-down seas he painted at Belle-Île in 1886, such as Storm off Belle-Île, where even the horizon disappears.

Meaning

The subject has a pedigree. Claude Monet had grown up in Le Havre and learned to paint outdoors on that coast with Eugène Boudin, and Gustave Courbet's wave paintings of the late 1860s were a direct precedent for a canvas given over entirely to breaking water. Where Courbet's waves are heavy and sculptural, Monet's are broken into light and movement, a record of a moment rather than a monument.

Where to see it

Stormy Sea is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, alongside other Monets including a Waterloo Bridge. For museums worldwide, see where to see Monet's paintings.