Varengeville, Low Tide

Varengeville, marée basse (Varengeville, Low Tide) is a beach scene by Claude Monet painted on the Normandy coast near Dieppe in 1882: the sea has drawn back, leaving a broad stretch of wet sand, tide pools and rocks at the foot of a great cliff. Signed and dated '82 and catalogued by Wildenstein as no. 723, it was given to the Kunst Museum Winterthur in Switzerland in 2000 by Beat Wolfer, Marianne Wolfer and Silvia Largo-Wolfer, and is on display at the museum's Beim Stadthaus building.

What you're looking at

The composition is split by a diagonal. On the right a high wall of cliff rises almost to the top of the canvas, its sheer face painted in vertical strokes of rust, ocher, violet and blue-gray, scored by the shadows of gullies; its top is a ragged edge against the sky. Below it, rocks covered with dark green and black seaweed lie scattered across the wet beach, each a few flat strokes of bottle green, black and blue.

On the left the beach opens out as a wide band of pale golden sand, ribbed by the receding tide and painted in long, warm horizontal strokes. A shallow channel of water, pale blue-green and silver, runs through the middle toward the far distance, where a low headland in green and blue closes the bay. A few tiny figures, probably shrimpers or shell-gatherers, stand far off on the sand. The sky above is a broad field of gray and white cloud with patches of pale blue, filling nearly half the canvas. The signature and date are at lower left.

Where and when it was painted

In 1882 Monet based himself at Pourville, a small resort just west of Dieppe, and walked the coast in both directions, east to the Dieppe cliffs and west toward Varengeville, where the beach below the cliffs is strewn with rocks at low tide. He painted the shore at different states of the tide and the clifftops above, including the church of Varengeville and the customs officers' hut. The low-tide pictures, with their wide, empty beaches, are among the calmest of the campaign. See Étretat and the Normandy Coast.

How it was painted

Monet treats each material with a different stroke: vertical drags for the cliff face, flat dabs for the seaweed, long horizontals for the sand and water, and broad, soft scumbles for the clouds. The palette balances the warm gold of the sand and rust of the cliff against the cool greens and blues of the water and rocks. The almost square format, 60 by 70 centimeters, gives more room to sky and beach than his usual wider canvases.

How it compares

The same low-tide shore appears in Low Tide at Pourville, near Dieppe in Cleveland, in bright sun, and in The Rocks at Pourville, Low Tide in Rochester, which concentrates on the rocks. The Winterthur canvas is set apart by the towering cliff on the right, almost a portrait of the rock face. For the clifftops above, see The Church at Varengeville, Grey Weather and The Customs House, Afternoon Effect.

Tides and timing

Low-tide motifs set Monet a practical problem: the scene he wanted existed for only a few hours twice a day, and the hour shifted daily. On the Normandy coast he learned to plan his work around tide tables as well as the sun, returning to a motif when water and light were right. That discipline, of waiting for an effect to come round again, became the working method of his later series.

Where to see it

The painting is in the Kunst Museum Winterthur, northeast of Zürich, a museum known for its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings (inventory G.2000.14). For other Swiss and international collections of Monet, see where to see Monet's paintings.