The Beach at Étretat

What you are looking at

A long beach of grey-brown shingle curves away from us toward a towering cliff. Along it, in tight rows, lie the fishing boats of Étretat, hauled up out of reach of the tide: dark hulls with bands of red, white and green, some tipped on their sides, their bows pointing at the water. On the left the sea is a cold grey-green, and a single line of surf rolls in on a long diagonal, a bright white seam that leads the eye to the foot of the cliff. Two small boats with rust-red sails are working offshore. Tiny figures, fishermen and their families, stand among the hulls near the bottom edge.

The cliff is the Falaise d'Amont, the eastern headland of the bay. Its face catches a low sun along the top in ochre and olive, and at its far end, where it runs out into the sea at left, you can make out the small arch of the Porte d'Amont. The Musée d'Orsay's title, Étretat, la plage et la porte d'Amont, names it.

Claude Monet painted the canvas in 1883. It measures 66 by 81 centimeters, is number 828 in Wildenstein's catalogue, and is signed at lower right.

Where and when

Étretat is a fishing village on the Normandy coast north of Le Havre, closed between two chalk headlands: the Amont cliff to the east, the Aval cliff with its arch and needle to the west. Monet knew it from his youth and had wintered there in 1868–69, but he came to paint it seriously at the end of January 1883, staying about three weeks at the Hôtel Blanquet. He worked from the beach and the cliff paths in raw winter weather, often on several canvases at once, and wrote to Alice Hoschedé about gales that kept him indoors and seas that changed faster than he could paint.

That winter he was 42, newly settled at Poissy and about to move to Giverny in April. He needed pictures for a one-man show Durand-Ruel was staging in Paris in March 1883, and he came back with some of the most famous images of the coast, including The Manneporte and Rough Sea at Étretat. For the whole coastal campaign, see Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

This picture is quieter than the storm and arch pictures. Its subject is the working beach, where the fishermen kept their boats, and the cliff is a backdrop rather than the star.

The boats are the key to the composition. Monet lines them up in a fan that follows the curve of the shore, getting smaller and closer together as they recede, so they measure out the depth of the bay. Each hull is a few strokes: a dark line for the gunwale, a band of red or white, a curved touch of shadow underneath. The same three or four colors repeat from boat to boat, which turns the beach into a pattern.

Then look at the cliff. Its face is made of short vertical and diagonal strokes of ochre, olive and grey that follow the chalk strata, with warmer color along the lit top and a cool, shadowed base. The surf line is the boldest stroke in the picture: thick white paint dragged in one long diagonal and broken at its edge into flecks of foam. Against it, the green sea is laid in flatter, horizontal touches.

The motif and its siblings

Monet painted the boats on the beach several times in 1883 and again in 1885, when he returned for a longer autumn stay. Compare Boats on the Beach at Étretat from the same visit, and the later Boats on the Beach at Étretat in Chicago, where the hulls fill the foreground. On the other side of the bay the Aval cliff is the subject of The Cliffs at Étretat.

Painters had come to Étretat since the 1830s; Courbet painted its cliffs and its boats on the shingle in 1869–70. Monet's version keeps the working life of the beach while making the weather and the light the real subject.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Musée d'Orsay: see Monet at the Musée d'Orsay. For more on the painter, see Claude Monet.