The Customs House at Varengeville

The Customs House at Varengeville from 1897 at the Art Institute of Chicago belongs to Monet's periodic returns to the Normandy coast in the 1880s and 1890s, specifically to the clifftop location at Varengeville-sur-Mer where a small coastguard lookout building stood exposed above the English Channel. Monet had first worked at Varengeville in 1882 during his Norman coastal campaigns, and the same building appears in multiple canvases across several visits spanning fifteen years — a minor pre-serial series within his broader engagement with the Normandy coast. The building's exposure and isolation on the cliff edge — the wide sky, the sea visible in every direction, the low scrubby vegetation of the clifftop — gave Monet a subject that concentrated his interest in the meeting of solid architecture and boundless atmospheric space. By 1897 he was working on the Morning on the Seine series simultaneously, and the return to the Normandy coast had the quality of revisiting a subject he had explored in a different phase of his development.

The small building is set against an expansive sky and sea, its modest architectural mass dwarfed by the natural elements around it. Monet renders the cliff grasses and scrub with vigorous, gestural strokes while the sea and sky are broadly and atmospherically treated. The colour of the sea approaches Monet's most saturated blues and greens.