Sur la falaise de Dieppe

What you are looking at

We stand high on the cliffs and look west along the coast. In the lower right corner a great rounded headland, covered in grass, drops steeply out of the picture; behind it a second shoulder of cliff steps down, and beyond it the coastline reaches out in a long, low promontory toward the horizon. On the left, below us, the sea spreads out wide and calm, catching the light of a low sun in a broad path of pale yellow and lilac. The sky is a warm haze of cream, peach and pink, with a few soft streaks of cloud.

The light is the whole subject. The edges of the cliffs, where they turn toward the sun, are touched with thin lines of gold and orange, as if the grass were lit from behind. The shaded faces are green, violet and blue. The far headland is almost the same color as the sky.

The detail that rewards close looking is the line of light running along the top of the near cliff. It is a few dragged strokes of orange laid over the green, and it is what turns a mass of grass into a ridge catching the evening sun.

There is no figure, boat or building in sight. Monet, who in 1882 often put a customs cottage, a walker or a sail into his Pourville views, now leaves the coast empty, so nothing distracts from the slow change of light over cliff and water.

Where and when it was painted

In January 1897 Monet went back to Pourville, the small resort just west of Dieppe on the Normandy coast where he had worked in 1882, and stayed until the spring. He painted the cliffs, the gorges and the sea again and again, in grey weather, in fog and in sunshine. Like the dawn pictures of the Seine he made at Giverny the following summer, such as Arm of the Seine near Giverny, the 1897 coast pictures turn away from drama toward a single unified tone of light.

This canvas is closely related to Steep Cliffs near Dieppe in the Hermitage, which shows almost the same view under an overcast sky. Placed side by side, the two pictures show what changing light does to a fixed motif, the principle of Monet's series. For his first Pourville pictures of 1882, compare Cliffs near Dieppe in Zurich and Cliff Walk at Pourville. For the whole coast, see Étretat and the Normandy coast.

How it was painted

The canvas is 65 by 92 centimeters, a standard horizontal size. Monet laid in the sea and sky in thin, closely related tints and built up the cliffs in many small, dense strokes, giving them a soft, furry texture against the smooth water. The composition, with the dark mass of cliff pushed into one corner and a vast empty field of sea, recalls the Japanese prints of coastlines by Hiroshige and Hokusai that Monet collected and hung in his house at Giverny.

The palette is high-keyed and narrow, nearly all yellows, pinks, lilacs and greens, with no true dark anywhere. That tonal unity is typical of Monet's work around 1897 and looks forward to the London pictures he would begin in 1899, where fog and sun dissolve the city into a single color.

Ownership and where to see it

The painting was in private collections for more than a century. It entered the Musée d'Orsay in 2023 (inventory RF MO P 2023 1), one of the museum's most recent Monet acquisitions, and is one of very few pictures from the 1897 Pourville campaign in a French public collection. In the Orsay it joins earlier coast pictures such as The Beach at Étretat and The Rocks of Belle-Île, which makes it easy to trace how Monet's view of the sea softened over fifteen years. See Monet at the Musée d'Orsay and the Claude Monet page.