Cat. 12. Cliffs and Sea, Sainte-Adresse, c. 1865

Navigation Title: Catalogue #: 12 Creator: Claude Monet French, 1840-1926 Work Title: Cliffs and Sea, Saint-Adresse, c. 1865 Creation: 1865 Materials: Black chalk on off-white laid paper Credit Line: Clarence Buckingham Collection Accession: 1987.56 Tombstone: Curatorial Entry:

Monet and Normandy

Though born in Paris, Monet was raised in Le Havre, a city in Normandy located at the mouth of the Seine River on the English Channel [illustrate simple period map of Normandy region indicating the sites discussed—will have to have graphic design create this; see image #1 for example]  Having relocated there around the age of five with his family so that his father could work in the wholesale grocery business with his brother-in-law, Jacques Lecadre, Monet spent most of his childhood and adolescent years in the region and learned its picturesque coastal sites, villages, and vantage points very well.  The Normandy coast changed dramatically over the course of the 19^th century, due, in large part, to the expanded rail network and the proliferation of travel guidebooks and illustrated publications.  What were once small, rural fishing villages at the beginning of the century rapidly became seaside resorts for tourists and vacationers, thereby changing the physical and social landscape in dramatic ways.1 

 

 

Not only did the coastal landscape and sites of Normandy become popular for tourists, but they were also favorite subjects of many 19^th century artists, especially Monet, who painted the region’s natural and man-made attractions hundreds of times during his career and is considered by many to be “the greatest visual poet of Normandy.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_2]  Monet’s seascapes of the 1860s—the decade before he became known as the leader of the Impressionist movement—most often featured the coasts at Le Havre (on the northern bank of the estuary of the Seine) [show map], Honfleur (on the southern bank of the estuary, across from Le Havre) [show map], and as visualized in the present picture, Sainte-Adresse [show map], a coastal suburb just northwest of Le Havre where the artist’s aunt, Sophie Lacadre, owned a villa.  Recently scholars have noted that during this decade, there were divided opinions about the condition of Sainte-Adresse: some commented that “all the seductions of solitude, silence and oceanic contemplation still reign there”; others complained that it had “lost most of the rustic appearance which gave it its charm.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_3]  In any event, Sainte-Adresse was certainly more accessible to the public imagination by the mid-1860s, for it already had been popularized by the writings of French critic Alphonse Karr[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_4] and documented by artists including painters Jean Baptiste Camille Corot,[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_5] Johan Barthold Jongkind,[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_6] and Frédéric Bazille,[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_7] as well photographer Gustave Le Gray [comparative illustrations of 2 Gustave Le Gray photographs of Sainte-Adresse in AIC’s collection (1971.577.15; 1971.577.8); see images #2 and 3].[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_8]  It is through this complex lens that one must read Monet’s The Beach at Sainte-Adresse.

 

Monet’s Early Paintings of Sainte-Adresse and the Normandy Coast

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse was executed in the summer of 1867, a time that was extraordinarily challenging for Monet.  Having learned earlier that year that his mistress, Camille Doncieux, was pregnant, Monet moved into his aunt’s home in Sainte-Adresse, and in order to distance the situation from his disapproving family, he discreetly shuttled back and forth to Paris, where he had arranged for Camille to be cared for.  Despite (or perhaps because of) his complicated personal life, Monet was productive; by the end of June, he wrote from Sainte-Adresse to painter Frédéric Bazille that he had “twenty or so canvases well under way, stunning seacapes, figures, and gardens, something of everything in fact.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_9]  It was not the first time Monet had painted the Normandy coast, or specifically Sainte-Adresse, however.  Just two years earlier, Monet made his debut at the 1865 Paris Salon, where he exhibited two large, ambitious seascapes of the region—Pointe de la Hève at Low Tide (Kimbell Art Museum), a picture depicting the Sainte-Adresse beach looking northward; and Mouth of the Seine, Honfleur (Norton Simon Museum), which portrays a site on the southern bank of the estuary of the Seine, across from Le Havre[comparative illustrations of both; reference map; see images #4 and 5].[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_10]  These two works—largely praised by Salon critics—were painted in Monet’s studio and were based on smaller oil studies on canvas that he had previously made on location.[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_11]  Notable in these Salon compositions as well as other paintings he made around this time is the fact that the artist downplayed the ongoing resort development in Normandy’s landscape.  Created in large part with a rather muted, gray- and brown-infused palette, Monet’s earlier seascapes predominantly depicted brooding natural environments and featured the Normandy beaches and terrain as the workplace of its local inhabitants and fishermen.[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_12]

Monet’s subsequent seascapes from the summer of 1867, however, proved to be markedly different from those he painted only a couple of years earlier.  The Beach at Sainte-Adresse exemplifies his evolving painting technique at this time and foreshadows some of the qualities that would later become characteristic of the Impressionist movement; indeed, the fact that Monet seems to have chosen to first exhibit this painting publicly at the Second Impressionist exhibition in 1876—nearly ten years after the painting was executed—is a testament to his own recognition of this.  Perhaps the most striking change is that Monet—in contrast to his earlier coastal landscapes—painted The Beach at Sainte-Adresse out-of-doors.  Complaining of the difficulty of painting en plein air, Monet wrote to Bazille in July of that summer:  “I am losing my sight,” he said. “I can barely see after working for half an hour; the doctor told me that I had to stop painting out of doors.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_13]  Undoubtedly, the severe glare he experienced and the changing weather conditions contributed to the color choices Monet used in creating these pictures, and indeed, the palette used in The Beach at Sainte-Adresse is blonder and brighter than that used in his 1865 Salon seascapes. In large part, this is due to the artist’s greater use of localized strong color as well paint mixtures that are cooler in tone and that mixed with a greater amount of lead white especially in the beach and sky areas. [link to technical report].

The paintings Monet executed in Sainte-Adresse in the summer of 1867 also differed from his earlier depictions in terms of their subject matter, for it was these pictures that comprised the artist’s “first sustained campaign of painting that involved tourism.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_14] The viewer is immediately drawn to the visible artifacts of local life in The Beach at Sainte-Adresse—dark-sailed fishing boats drift in the water and other beached sea-crafts are surrounded by fishermen and some of their work accessories.  Monet’s placement of the two groups of boats, however, frames two figures sitting on the shoreline: a man in a dark hat and suit looking out to sea or sky through his telescope accompanied by a woman wearing a yellow hat with a red ribbon.  The woman’s dress—perhaps the composition’s brightest element—further draws the viewer’s gaze; one of the few areas of notably greater impasto in the painting, Monet constructs the garment out of a few strokes of the mostrelatively pure lead white paint that is used throughout the composition[link to technical report; perhaps one could use the zoomify tool here to zoom in on the couple; see images # 6.1 and 6.2].  Upon recognition of this couple—undoubtedly vacationers on account of their attire—the narrative of the painting changes.  As aptly noted by Robert Herbert, “we are obliged to convert a traditional seacoast scene to one that has been invaded by modern life.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_15]

New Observations

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse is often considered to be a pendant to Monet’s Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) [show comp. ill. of Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (see image #7); can we see both pictures on the screen at the same time?].  Though there is no evidence that the artist wanted to exhibit or sell these paintings as a pair,[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_16] Regatta, also executed during the summer of 1867, is painted on a canvas very close in size (possibly custom ordered) to the Art Institute’s painting [link to technical report], and both depict the same portion of the Sainte-Adresse beach and include signs—notably a new villa on top of the hill at left and the presence of vacationers—of the physical and social transformations taking place at the resort destination.  Many scholars have noted the complementary nature of these two paintings, however.  Although each picture references the coexistence of local and tourist life at Sainte-Adresse, Beach is dominated by fishermen and dark-sailed working boats, while Regatta is filled with urban tourists and white-sailed leisure yachts.[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_17]  Furthermore, the former has a slightly sketchier paint quality and depicts the water at low tide with an overcast sky; on the contrary, the latter’s compositional elements seem more finished, and it portrays a sunny day at high tide.[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_18] 

Technical analysis undertaken in 2009 [link to technical report],however, reveals that Monet did not always intend for local life to dominate The Beach at Sainte-Adresse; in fact there are a number of indications that the Art Institute’s composition was originally much more similar to that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s painting than has been previously recognized.    Infrared reflectography reveals that in an earlier stage of the Art Institute’s canvas there was a group of three figures present on the shoreline at the right side of the painting—a male appears on the left, and a male/female couple on the right [show IR image and overlay; see images # 8 and 9].  Though it is difficult to determine the specific details of their clothing, it is clear that this is a group of city-dwelling vacationers: the woman, located in the center of the three, wears a long dress, and she and the two men accompanying her sport hats, the silhouettes of which look like those seen on the tourists in Regatta at Sainte-Adresse.  Moreover, these figures face the water, much in the same way as the tourists depicted in the Metropolitan’s picture look out onto the English Channel to watch the regatta.  Painted on a scale similar to or slightly larger than the three fishermen at left (which, it is important to note, were late additions to the painting), these well-dressed figures were clearly the prominent human element in the original composition. 

IR and x-ray images of The Beach at Sainte-Adresse also indicate that in an earlier stage of the composition Monet included an additional cluster of boats in the water along the right side of the canvas [show x-ray and IR images and overlay; see images # 8, 9 and 10]. Though subsequently painted out, these earlier sea-crafts had sails that were similar in form and scale to the small- and medium-sized leisure yachts in the Metropolitan’s painting, although none equaled size of the largest boat in the foreground of Regatta.  More importantly, however, is that the sails on the earlier boats in The Beach at Sainte-Adresse were white, indicating that they were pleasure boats, not dark-sailed, local fishing boats like those that appear in the final composition.  By painting out these original sailboats and replacing them with working boats, Monet changed the narrative of the painting from one that foregrounded the leisure class to one that featured local life at Sainte-Adresse. 

When Monet wrote to Bazille in June 1867, he described that “among my seascapes, I’m painting the regattas at Le Havre with lots of people on the beach and the ship lane covered with small sails.”[footnote:osci_body_fn_44_19]  While the Metropolitan’s painting fits neatly into this characterization, it has always been difficult to reconcile the subject matter of The Beach at Sainte-Adresse with Monet’s description since the painting’s subject matter has little to do with regattas or the tourist population that would gather to watch them. The presence of vacationers and white-sailed boats in an earlier stage of the painting suggests, however, that Monet indeed began the Art Institute’s picture within the framework that he outlined to Bazille and that he did not originally intend The Beach at Sainte-Adresse and Regatta at Sainte-Adresse to be as dichotomous as has often been believed.  It was only at a later stage in his painting process that he deliberately complicated the meaning of The Beach at Sainte-Adresse and, more significantly, the dialogue it shares with the Metropolitan’s picture.

Technical Report:

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Provenance: Exhibitions: Selected References: Other Documentation: Footnotes:

The following books and exhibition catalogues were extremely beneficial to the writing of this entry and for understanding the changing landscape of Normandy and the way in which Monet and other Impressionist artists treated the sites and subjects of the region: Robert L. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Richard Brettell et. al., Monet in Normandy, exh. cat. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/North Carolina Museum of Art/The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2006); and John House and David Hopkin, Impressionists by the Sea, exh. cat. (Royal Academy of Arts, 2007).  For a detailed chronology of Monet’s life, see Charles F. Stuckey, Claude Monet 1840-1926, exh. cat. (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995). Brettell et. al. 2006, p. 15. Eugène Chapus, De Paris à Rouen et au Havre (Paris, 1862), p. 244 and Eugène d’Auriac, Guide pratique, historique et descriptif aux bains de mer de la Manche et de l’Océan (Paris, 1866), p. 200 as cited and quoted in House and Hopkin 2007, p. 125.  House and Hopkin 2007, p. 15-16.  Karr’s 1836 novel Le Chemin le plus court features the story of a young painter from Le Havre and referenced numerous sites on the Normandy coast.  Karr also published Les Soirées de Sainte-Adresse in 1853. Alfred Robaut, L’oeuvre de Corot: catalogue raisonné et illustré, precede de l’histoire de Corot et de ses oeuvres (par Étienne Moreau-Nélaton), vol. 2 (Paris: L. Laget, 1965), nos. 230, 235, 238, 239 (all are dated to 1830-40) are identified as Sainte-Adresse. Adolphe Stein et al., Jongkind: catalogue critique de l’oeuvre (Paris: Brame & Lorenceau, 2003), nos. 50 (1847), 116 (1853), 216 (1858), 271 (1862), 272 (1862), 273 (1862), 274 (1862), 309 (1863), and 430 (1866) are identified as Sainte-Adresse. Michel Schulman, Frédéric Bazille 1841-1870: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Editions de l’Amateur: Editions des Catalogues raisonnés, 1995), no. 18 (1865) is identified as Sainte-Adresse. As early as 1850, photographic studios began to be established in towns along the Normandy coast.  Among the numerous photographers documenting the region was Gustave Le Gray, who made a series of photographs there during the summers of 1856 and 1858.  Many of Le Gray’s views documented the transformation of the Normandy coastline.  However, he was pioneering in his technical skills and in his creation of atmospheric photographs that referenced little or no narrative context.  Le Gray’s sea-views instantly received acclaim in London and Paris, and it has been argued that Monet certainly would have known about Le Gray’s photographs and may have played a role in his (and other Impressionists’) treatment of subject matter and interest in capturing the momentary; see Carole McNamara, “Painting and Photography in Normandy: The Aesthetic of the Instant,” in The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874, exh. cat. (University of Michigan Museum of Art/ Hudson Hills Press, 2009), pp. 15-33.  [this is an example where the note may need to be moved to a subsection on photography and Impressionism.] Indeed, there is a certain affinity between Le Gray’s photograph The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (AIC 1971.577.15) and the Monet painting that is the subject of this entry. French transcription of letter dated 25 June [1867] from Monet to Bazille in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Tome I, 1840-1881 Peintures (Lausanne/Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1974, pp. 423-24, letter 33. English trans. of letter by Bridget Strevens Romer in Richard Kendall, ed., Monet by himself (London: Macdonald Orbis, 1989), p. 24. According to Wildenstein 1996, Monet executed the following paintings of the Normandy coast before 1867: Wildenstein 1996, nos. 22, 22c, 39, 39a, 40, and 52 are identified as Sainte-Adresse; Wildenstein 1996, nos. 26, 27, 31, 3, 37, 38, 41, 51, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, and 77a are identified as Honfleur; Wildenstein 1996, nos. 22a and 22b are identified as Etretat; no location is identified for Wildenstein 1996, nos. 23, 48, 49, 72 and 73, all of which seem to have been marine-themed. See object entry for Mouth of the Seine, Honfleur, in Richard R. Brettell and Stephen F. Eisenman, Nineteenth-Century Art in the Norton Simon Museum, vol. 1 (Norton Simon Art Foundation, 2006), cat. 84, pp. 316-20. According to Wildenstein 1996, pp. 23-24, Horses at The Pointe de La Hève (Private collection; Wildenstein 1996, cat. 40) is the study for the Kimbell painting and The Lighthouse by the Hospice (Kunsthaus Zürich; Wildenstein 1996, cat. 38) is the study for the Norton Simon painting. Brettell et. al. 2006, pp. 42-43. French transcription of letter dated 3 July [1867] from Monet to Bazille in Wildenstein 1974, p. 424, letter 34.  This English translation taken from Gary Tinterow’s entry for Monet’s Regatta at Sainte-Adresse in Masterpieces of European Painting, 1800-1920, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2007), p. 136. Herbert 1994, p. 9. Herbert 1994, p. 11. These details have been noted in a number of texts including Tinterow 2007, p. 136 and House and Hopkin 2007, pp. 130-31. The only reference to the local fisherfolk in Regatta is the small, lone dark-sailed boat in the center of the composition. Most of these observations have been made in Herbert 1994, Brettell et. al. 2006, House and Hopkin 2007, among numerous others. French transcription of letter dated 25 June [1867] from Monet to Bazille in Daniel Wildenstein, Claude Monet: Biographie et catalogue raisonné, Tome I, 1840-1881 Peintures (Lausanne/Paris: La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1974, pp. 423-24, letter 33. English trans. of letter by Bridget Strevens Romer in Richard Kendall, ed., Monet by himself (London: Macdonald Orbis, 1989), p. 24.