Boats on the Beach at Étretat

Painted in 1885 during one of Monet's extended Étretat campaigns and now in the Art Institute of Chicago, Boats on the Beach at Étretat brings the foreground of the beach itself into prominence — the wooden fishing boats hauled up on the shingle among fishermen and their equipment. Monet was interested in the working life of the Norman coast, not simply the dramatic cliffs and arches that dominated his seascape series. The boats introduced geometric forms against the organic movement of sea and cliff, creating compositional variety. Chicago's collection of Impressionist painting, built largely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by enthusiastic Midwestern collectors, made the Art Institute a major repository of Monet's work.

Oil on canvas balancing the flat geometric planes of the boat hulls against the textured surfaces of shingle, sea, and cliff. Monet's brushwork differentiates material — the solid painted wood of the boats, the shifting pebbles of the beach, the moving water — while maintaining the overall unity of light across the scene.