Three Fishing Boats

What you are looking at

Three big wooden fishing boats lie on the beach, hauled up out of the surf and propped at an angle on the stones. They fill the canvas almost edge to edge. The middle one is bright yellow-green with a black hull and a registration number painted on its bow; the others are black with yellow trim.

Long oars and spars lie across them and spill onto the shingle, and their masts lean out of the top of the picture. A dark post stands in the foreground, and rope trails from the bows. Behind them, a gray-green sea heaves up in curling waves edged with white foam.

We are standing very close, looking down at the boats as if we had just walked along the beach and stopped beside them. The light is flat and gray, the light of a windy autumn day.

Étretat, 1885

Étretat, a fishing village on the Normandy coast famous for its arches of white chalk, drew Claude Monet repeatedly in the 1880s. He spent the autumn of 1885 there, staying into December, painting the cliffs, the beach and the boats in all weathers. The local fishing boats, broad and heavy, were winched up the shingle when the sea was rough, and Monet painted them many times, in groups of two, three or more. The village and the rest of the coast are covered on our Étretat and the Normandy Coast page.

This canvas is catalogued by Wildenstein as W.1029 and is dated 1885 or 1886 in different sources. A close relative, Fishing Boats at Étretat (W.1028), with the same boats seen from a slightly different angle, is in the Seattle Art Museum.

How it was painted

What makes this picture unusual is how close Monet comes. He crops the boats on both sides and from above, so they fill the frame like figures in a group portrait. The hulls are drawn with long, confident strokes that follow their curves: the lip of a gunwale, the swell of a bow, the line of a keel resting on stones. Inside them, a jumble of oars, nets and gear is painted in quick strokes of brown and gray.

Notice the yellow. It appears on the middle boat, along the edge of the right-hand boat, on the trim of the far left one, and in long streaks on the beach where light catches the wet pebbles, so the color itself seems to hold the three together. Against it, the sea is cool and agitated, painted in swirling, choppy strokes of green, gray and white that tell us why the boats are out of the water.

The registration lettering on the bows, an F followed by a number, is the kind of detail most viewers miss. F was the mark of the Fécamp maritime district, which took in Étretat, and the numbers remind us that these are not props but the tools of a living fishery.

The Étretat boats and how this version differs

Monet painted the boats of Étretat from many distances. In Boats on the Beach at Étretat they line the shingle beneath the cliffs; in The Departure of the Boats, Étretat they put out to sea under sail. Here the cliffs, the sky and the horizon are all gone. The boats become almost still-life objects, monumental and slightly comic, their bows nosing together like animals.

This close, cropped design, with the motif filling the canvas, links the picture to the series of the following decade. Compare also the lone silhouette of Sailboat, Evening Effect, probably painted on the same stay, where a single boat floats in a field of color.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Museum of Fine Arts (Szépművészeti Múzeum), Budapest, inventory 436.B. Budapest's French holdings are smaller than those of Paris or the American museums, but this is one of their best-loved Impressionist canvases. For other collections with Monet's coastal pictures, see Where to See Monet's Paintings.