The Church at Varengeville, Grey Weather

Église de Varengeville, temps gris (The Church at Varengeville, Grey Weather) is a Claude Monet view of the small church of Saint-Valery at Varengeville-sur-Mer, standing on the cliffs above the English Channel west of Dieppe, painted on an overcast day in 1882. Catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 725, it came to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1964 as the bequest of Mrs. Blakemore Wheeler.

What you're looking at

The church sits small and far off on the upper left, at the crest of a long green slope: a gray stone building with a pointed slate spire, seen in silhouette against a pale sky, with a clump of trees beside it. The slope runs down from it across the left half of the canvas in broad strokes of emerald, olive and blue-green, flecked with rust and pink where the grass turns.

The right half is held by two tall, thin pines, their trunks leaning and twisting, their crowns spread like dark umbrellas of blue-black and deep green against the sky. The wind has bent them, and their shapes recall the trees in Japanese prints. At their feet a mass of gorse or broom in dark gold, ocher and bronze fills the foreground. Beyond them, at the right, the sea is a band of pale blue-gray reaching to the horizon, with two small sails. The sky is a soft, gray-yellow haze with little contrast, the "grey weather" of the title. The signature and date are at lower right.

Where and when it was painted

In 1882 Monet spent the spring and summer at Pourville, near Dieppe, and walked the cliffs westward to Varengeville. The church, isolated on the cliff edge with the sea below, gave him one of his most memorable motifs. The Speed notes that he painted the church from the hillside in three versions at different times of day. See Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

Monet sets the church far away and puts the near trees and bushes in front, so the composition has a strong foreground and a deep, empty middle. The pines are painted in agitated, curling strokes of very dark color, the slope in long, sweeping ones, and the sky in thin, smooth layers. Before its recent conservation the painting's varnish had yellowed; a Speed-funded treatment restored its cooler, grayer tones, and it was shown again in 2022.

How this version differs

Of the views of the church from below, the Barber Institute's The Church at Varengeville in Birmingham shows it against a golden evening sky, with the church in dark silhouette. The Speed canvas is the gray-day version, cool and muted, with the pines dominating. Compare also the clifftop hut nearby in The Customs House, Afternoon Effect and The Fisherman's House, Overcast Weather, and the shore below in Varengeville, Low Tide.

Japanese echoes

Monet collected Japanese woodblock prints, and their influence is clear in the two pines here: tall, thin, isolated against an empty sky, with their crowns spread flat like brushwork. Hiroshige and Hokusai often framed distant views through such trees. Monet uses the device to divide the picture between the land, with its church, and the open sea, and to give a strong, almost graphic accent to an otherwise misty, low-contrast scene.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky (accession 1964.31.20), the bequest of Mrs. Blakemore Wheeler. It is usually on view in the European galleries. For other places to see Monet, see where to see Monet's paintings.