Interpretive Resource

By the time this picture was painted, the Impressionists had begun to rethink the style that had marked the heyday of their movement in the 1870's. While Camille Pissarro would come under the influence of Georges Seurat’s theories and Pierre Auguste Renoir changed his style to include monumental figures, Claude Monet focused with ever increasing tenacity on his original goal of painting "directly from nature, striving to render my impression in the face of the most fugitive effects." In an effort to achieve an accurate impression rather than a composite effect, Monet had by then adopted a method of working simultaneously on a number of canvases depicting the same subject. He changed canvases every time the ‘light changed substantially and returned to a particular canvas on subsequent days when he thought the effect of light corresponded to that work. The writer Guy de Maupassant observed Monet working in this way at Etretat in 1885 and published his recollections the following year:

"I often followed Claude Monet about in his search for impressions. He was no longer a painter, actually; he was a hunter. He walked along, trailed by children carrying canvases, five or six canvases representing the same subject at various hours of the day and with varying effects. He would pick them up or drop them one by one according to how the sky changed. And face to face with his subject he would sit and wait, watching the sky and shadows, gathering up a falling ray or passing cloud in several dabs of the brush and setting it down on his canvas with great alacrity. I once saw him catch a sparkling shaft of light on a white cliff and fix it to a rush of yellows that gave an eerily precise rendering of the blinding ineffable effect of its radiance."

This painting seems indeed to have been achieved through such a process. The artist focused here on one of his favorite subjects, the white cliffs near the town of Etretat on the coast of Normandy, where Monet vacationed frequently between 1883 and 1886. Monet viewed this scene from a distant vantage point that enabled him to encompass a vast expanse of beach, water, and sky, as well as the cliffs. These rise with rugged majesty from a curving span of beach dotted with boats and brightly colored sails. The water’s surface is broken by the orange sail of a solitary boat, the horizon line animated by a bank of scudding clouds. The scene is drenched in what appears to be the early afternoon sun, since the shadows cast by the cliffs are short, indicating that the sun is overhead. Monet’s brushstrokes are bold, quick, and confident, the surface of the painting often showing heavily impastoed areas, as he records the scene before him rapidly, in a constant race against time and its inevitable effects on conditions of light and atmosphere. Pinks and blues predominate, richly modulated with touches of yellow, green, purple, and white. This is in many respects a quintessential Impressionist picture, with all the freshness, vividness, and pleasure we have come to associate with that style of painting.