Étretat, the Porte d'Aval: Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor

Étretat, the Porte d'Aval from 1885 belongs to Monet's sustained campaign at the Norman coastal town that he returned to in the winters of 1883, 1884, 1885, and 1886, producing over forty canvases of the chalk cliffs and their extraordinary natural arches. Étretat had attracted major painters before him — Delacroix had sketched there in 1820, and Courbet's 1870 Étretat cliff paintings loomed as an unavoidable precedent — but Monet's approach was fundamentally different from Courbet's. Where Courbet emphasized the physical mass and geological solidity of the chalk, Monet pursued the effects of light, water, and atmosphere on the same forms, dissolving what Courbet had made solid. The fishing boats departing in the canvas give the scene human scale and documentary specificity — Étretat was still an active fishing port, not merely a tourist destination — while the cliff and arch dominate as natural architecture. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon holds this canvas as an example of Monet's 1880s coastal campaigns.

The dramatic arch frames the fishing fleet against open sea. Monet uses sharp contrasts between the dark cliff faces and the bright, foam-flecked water below. Broken brushwork renders sea spray and movement, while the solid cliff is painted with firmer, more deliberate strokes of grey-white chalk tones.