On the Beach at Trouville

On the Beach at Trouville (Sur la plage à Trouville) is one of the small, spontaneous beach pictures Claude Monet painted in the summer of 1870, on his honeymoon at Trouville in Normandy. Camille, his new wife, sits on a beach chair in a blue-and-white striped dress beside a second young woman, with the busy summer beach behind them. It is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.

What you are looking at

Camille sits at left, close to us, on a wooden beach chair, her arm resting on its back and her face turned toward the viewer. She wears a loose white summer dress with blue stripes that ripple and bend with the folds of the fabric, and a dark straw hat trimmed with flowers, with her dark hair in long braids over her shoulders. Her cheeks are flushed pink. At lower right, cut off by the edge of the canvas, a second young woman, also in a striped white dress with a dark hat, bends forward, absorbed in something in her lap, perhaps a book or sewing.

Behind them the beach runs back toward a crowd of summer visitors: a man in a top hat, women in dark dresses, a cluster of figures under a blue umbrella, and small bright dabs of red and white. At right, on the far headland, the town of Trouville rises on its hill. At left the gray sea meets a gray-white sky, with a couple of tall flagpoles marking the bathing area and small figures at the water's edge. The light is overcast and even. The signature is at lower left.

The two women are placed on a diagonal, one upright and facing us, one bent away, so that the eye moves from Camille's face down to her companion and then back into the crowd. The empty stretch of sand between them and the beach-goers gives the foreground a sense of private space within a public place, a quiet corner of a busy resort.

Where and when it was painted

Monet married Camille Doncieux on 28 June 1870 and took her and their son Jean to Trouville for the summer. Trouville was the most fashionable resort on the Normandy coast, a short trip from Paris and Le Havre, and Eugène Boudin, Monet's first teacher, had made it famous with his pictures of crinolined beach crowds. Boudin and his wife were there too. Monet's little canvases from that summer are often compared with Boudin's, and the two painters may have worked side by side. The coast is covered on our Normandy coast hub.

How it was painted

The picture is painted fast and directly, with the canvas visible between strokes in places. The stripes on Camille's dress are single dragged lines of blue over white, which follow the form of her body with no drawing beneath. The crowd in the background is shorthand: a dark stroke for a coat, a white one for a dress. Monet is less interested in Camille as a portrait than in the play of light on white fabric outdoors, the problem he had tackled on a grand scale in Women in the Garden three years earlier. Here, in a small sketch, he solves it in minutes.

The Trouville pictures

This is the twin of Camille on the Beach at Trouville at Yale, where Camille sits alone, holding her hat in the wind. The National Gallery in London owns a third version with both women, The Beach at Trouville. Monet also painted the resort's grand hotel in The Hôtel des Roches Noires. That summer ended with the Franco-Prussian War, and by autumn Monet had left France for London.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris (inventory 5016), which holds the largest collection of Monet's work in the world, much of it from the bequest of his son Michel in 1966. See our Musée Marmottan Monet page for the highlights, including Impression, Sunrise.