Étretat: The Beach and the Falaise d'Amont

Étretat: The Beach and the Falaise d'Amont from 1885 at the Art Institute of Chicago is among the most comprehensive Étretat compositions — showing the full beach at low tide with boats hauled ashore, the working fishing community that coexisted with the resort, and the eastern cliff (Falaise d'Amont) with its famous needle and arch. Monet worked at Étretat in the autumn and winter of 1885, a season that matched the dramatic conditions — heavy seas, Atlantic storms, the chalk cliffs glistening with spray — that he sought. The subject had attracted major predecessors: Eugène Isabey had painted Étretat in the 1840s, Delacroix had sketched the cliffs, and Courbet's 1869–70 Étretat paintings were canonical works of French Realism. Monet's conscious differentiation from Courbet — treating the same cliffs with atmospheric dissolution rather than physical solidity — was both a formal and a philosophical position. Guy de Maupassant, who lived near Étretat and wrote about the landscape in his novels, encountered Monet at work there and described in a celebrated passage the painter running between multiple canvases simultaneously, matching each to the passing light conditions.

Monet uses a broad, horizontal palette of soft greys, tans, and pale blues to capture overcast coastal light. The cliff mass is built in thick impasto strokes, while the wet beach foreground is rendered in fluid, reflective passages. Compositional diagonals of boat hulls lead the eye toward the cliff.