Boats on the Beach at Étretat 1885 Oil on canvas 66 x 82.3 cm (26 x 32 7/16 in.) Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection
By the mid-1880s, Claude Monet had distanced himself from the modern city, seeking landscape subjects in various parts of France instead. The Norman town of Étretat was famous for its cliffs, rock formations, and fashionable summer homes, but Boats on the Beach at Étretat shows none of these familiar sights. Forced indoors by inclement weather, Monet painted this narrow view of the beach from his room in the Hôtel Blanquet, where he stayed from mid-October to mid-December 1885. In a letter to his future wife, he noted that he had spent the afternoon “painting the caloges [disused fishing boats covered with tarred planks and used for storage] in the rain.”
This work is featured in the online catalogue Monet Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the first volume in the Art Institute’s scholarly digital series on the Impressionist circle. The catalogue offers in-depth curatorial and technical entries on 47 artworks by Claude Monet in the museum’s collection; entries feature interactive and layered high-resolution imaging, previously unpublished technical photographs, archival materials, and documentation relating to each artwork.
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