Sunset (Coucher de soleil)

What you are looking at

Almost the whole sheet is sky. Low across the bottom runs a dark band of land, brown, green and violet, with a clump of trees at the right edge. Above it a long seam of orange and yellow marks where the sun has just gone down. Then the clouds take over: heavy blue-violet masses drifting across a sky that shades from coral and pink near the horizon to pale green, buff and blue at the top. Here and there Monet has drawn quick zigzags of yellow straight over the clouds, little flashes of light catching their edges, and one longer squiggle runs out at the right like a crack of lightning.

The color is warmer and more theatrical than in many of Monet's sky studies. The whole lower half of the sky is flushed with red and rose, and the violet clouds sit on it like smoke. A few small patches of cream break through near the center, where the light is strongest. Pale blue shows between the clouds only at the edges of the sheet.

Pastel and the sky

This Coucher de soleil is a pastel on paper, about 22 by 36 centimeters, dated to around 1868 and signed "Claude Monet" at lower right. Monet is so closely tied to oil that his pastels are easy to forget, but he used the medium throughout the 1860s. Pastel suited what he wanted from the sky: it is fast, needs no drying time, and can be laid on with the side of the stick for broad color or with the point for a single sharp line. Both are here. The clouds are rubbed in with soft, broad strokes; the yellow zigzags and the streak of the sunset are drawn with pressure, so they sit brightly on top. The paper's tone shows through in places, especially in the land, and serves as a middle value.

Le Havre and Boudin

Monet had learned to look at skies like this from Eugène Boudin, the painter of the Normandy beaches, whose own pastel studies of clouds the poet Baudelaire praised in his review of the Salon of 1859. When the sheet was offered at auction it was described as one of a group of studies of the skies near Le Havre under changing weather, the coast of Monet's youth, which our Normandy coast hub covers. In 1868 Monet was living partly at Étretat and Fécamp, struggling for money after the birth of his son Jean, and making pictures like Heavy Sea at Étretat.

A closely comparable sheet, Setting Sun (Nightfall), has the same low strip of land, yellow seam of light and banks of cloud, in cooler blues.

Looking closely

Notice how little drawing there is of the land. The trees at right are a few dark scribbles, and the ground is a single dragged band. Monet was not interested in place; he wanted the time of day. That focus anticipates the paintings that would make his name, from Impression, Sunrise in 1872 to later sunsets on the Seine such as Sunset on the Seine in Winter. The yellow zigzags in particular are a remarkably free mark for the 1860s, closer to a drawing than to a description of cloud.

Meaning

There is no subject other than the sky, and that is the point. Studies like this were private tools, a way of fixing in memory how color behaves in fading light. For Claude Monet they were also an apprenticeship in speed, the ability to catch an effect before it vanished, which became the basis of his whole method.

Where to see it

Because this pastel is privately owned, it is not on public view. It is listed in Daniel Wildenstein's catalogue raisonné among Monet's pastels as number P51, and it was offered at Christie's in London in February 2018. Monet's sunsets in oil can be seen in many museums; see where to see Monet's paintings.