The Cliffs at Étretat

What you are looking at

A long chalk cliff runs in from the left edge and ends in a great natural arch standing in the sea, with a slender pointed rock, the Needle, rising just beyond it. The cliff is painted in soft blues and grays, almost a silhouette against a sky glowing pink, peach and yellow. The light comes from behind the cliff, low on the horizon: it is late afternoon or evening.

Below, the sea is calm and luminous, a shimmering surface of pale yellow, lilac and blue strokes. A small fleet of fishing boats with dark sails is scattered across the bay, more of them in a line toward the right horizon. In the lower left, the curving edge of the beach sweeps around in a band of violet shadow, edged by a thin line of white foam where the water meets the shingle. Monet signed and dated it at lower left, "Claude Monet 86."

Where and when it was painted

Monet worked at Étretat on the Normandy coast in several campaigns between 1883 and 1886, staying for weeks at a time and painting the cliffs and arches in every light. His longest stay was in the autumn of 1885, from October into December, and this canvas probably began then, before being finished and dated in 1886.

The view is from the beach of Étretat looking west toward the Porte d'Aval, the most famous of the three arches, and the Aiguille (Needle), a rock spire some seventy meters high. Courbet and Delacroix had painted these cliffs before him, and Étretat was already a well-known resort. Monet painted the same motif from many positions and at many hours, in an early form of the serial method he would later perfect. See Étretat and the Normandy coast for the whole group.

How it was painted

The picture is about light against the light. With the sun low behind the cliff, the rock loses its detail and becomes a single cool shape, blue in shadow, with only its edges catching a little warmth. The sea, by contrast, reflects the bright sky and is painted in short, broken strokes of warm and cool color laid side by side, so that it shimmers.

Monet keeps the forms simple: the long horizontal of the cliff, the arch and the vertical of the Needle, the curve of the beach in the foreground. The boats are a few dark dabs each, their sails little triangles, placed in a rhythm across the water. The beach in the foreground is painted in broad, sweeping violet strokes that lead the eye into the bay. The palette is pastel throughout, with no true dark: even the shadows are blue and lilac. It is one of the softest and most atmospheric of the Étretat pictures.

The gap between the start of work in 1885 and the date of 1886 matters. Monet's letters from Étretat complain constantly of changing tides and weather that forced him to abandon canvases and begin again. Many were finished later in the studio at Giverny, where he could adjust the harmony of the whole without the motif in front of him. The unified, glowing color of this picture suggests that kind of reworking.

The Étretat paintings

Monet painted the Porte d'Aval from the beach many times, often with the fishing fleet setting out, as in Étretat, the Porte d'Aval: Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbour in Dijon and The Departure of the Boats, Étretat in Chicago. The neighboring arch of the Manneporte appears in The Manneporte near Étretat at the Met, and the earlier Clark Art Institute canvas is published here as The Cliffs at Étretat (1885). The Moscow picture stands out for its evening color and its stillness.

Ownership

The painting is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (Ж-3308). Like most of the Pushkin's Impressionists, it came from the great Moscow collections of French painting formed before the 1917 Revolution and later nationalized.

Where to see it

The Cliffs at Étretat is in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European paintings are shown in the Gallery of European and American Art. For other museums, see where to see Monet's paintings.