Hôtel des Roches Noires

Hôtel des Roches Noires from 1870 at the Musée d'Orsay was painted during Monet's honeymoon summer at Trouville, which he spent with Camille (they had married in June 1870) in the most fashionable seaside resort on the Norman coast. The Grand Hôtel des Roches Noires, the most prestigious hotel on the Trouville front, towers over the promenade in this canvas with its flags snapping in the sea breeze — the first of Monet's flag paintings, a subject he would return to in the Rue Montorgueil and Rue Saint-Denis canvases of 1878. The summer of 1870 was artistically productive — alongside the hotel façade he made beach scenes and seascapes at Trouville — but also overshadowed by the political crisis: the Franco-Prussian War began in July 1870, and by September Monet had fled with Camille and their son Jean to London, abandoning the canvases he had left in Normandy. The Trouville summer thus has the quality of a coda to the pre-war period of his career, a final interval of normal life before the rupture of war, exile, and eventual return to a changed France.

The flags snapping in the sea wind provide Monet's first exploration of flags as kinetic pictorial elements. The hotel façade is handled with broad, relatively flat strokes, while the figures on the terrace and boardwalk are indicated with the minimum of gestural marks. Sky and sea fill the upper and lower zones with atmospheric colour.