Cliffs of the Petites Dalles

Painted in 1880 and now at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Cliffs of the Petites Dalles captures a less-visited stretch of the Normandy coastline some kilometers from the famous Étretat arches. Monet explored the entire Norman coastal region systematically in his painting campaigns of the late 1870s and 1880s, treating lesser-known locations with the same intensive serial attention he gave to his most famous motifs. The Petites Dalles site offered high chalk cliffs and a narrow shingle beach; the composition would have emphasized the cliff face's texture and mass against sea and sky. Boston's acquisition places this work in a museum that built an exceptional Monet collection through early twentieth-century patronage.

Oil on canvas with Monet's layered brushwork distinguishing the geological solidity of the chalk cliff from the fluid movement of the sea below and the atmospheric breadth of the sky above. The 1880 date places this among his more tightly constructed coastal canvases before the looser serial experiments of the mid-1880s.