Sainte-Adresse

1867

Claude Monet

Artist, French, 1840 - 1926

We look slightly down onto a silvery-gray beach nestled in a hilly, curving coastline to our right in this horizontal landscape painting. A flat expanse of beach stretches in front of us to meet the water to our left. The horizon comes about halfway up the composition, and the sky above is nearly filled with heather-gray and white clouds, with only a few patches of light blue sky. Several earth-brown and black boats are pulled up onto the beach, to our left. A few poles and one anchor lie among them. A single, light gray and white pole lies perpendicular to the rest, coming toward us in the sand, higher up on the beach. Along the beach, beyond these boats, a man stands next to a woman holding a baby. The man wears an aquamarine-blue shirt and black pants and cap, and the woman wears a dress with a gray shirt and black skirt, partially covered by a cream-white apron. Several other adults and children stand and sit near boats to either side of the pair. The people are loosely painted, with only a few swipes and touches of paint, so details are indistinct. To our right, moss-green and camel-brown dunes rise from the beach, which lead to higher hills along the shoreline. The beach curves away from us to our right and then back out to our left, like a backward C. A sailboat with a fawn-brown sail sits along the beach at the curve, in the distance. A few buildings, painted with gray, yellow, red, and navy blue perch atop some hills, and more are suggested with dabs and strokes of slate blue and parchment white in the valley between hills. Farthest from us, the land rises to a high, long, flat promontory that extends about two-thirds of the way across the painting. The water in the bay is frosty, seafoam green, and a few strokes of white along the shore suggest waves. The water’s surface is mostly flat with a couple small, ink-black boats floating near the left edge and more along the horizon. The artist signed the work in brown paint in the lower right corner, “Claude Monet.”

Media Options

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In June 1867, at the urging of his father, Claude Monet went to Sainte- Adresse, a popular resort town on the Normandy coast, for an extended stay in the home of his aunt, Sophie Lecadre. His visit lasted until near winter and proved to be a period of intense activity. "I have my work cut out for me," Monet wrote to his friend and fellow painter Frédéric Bazille shortly after his arrival. "I have about 20 canvases well underway, some stunning seascapes and some figures and gardens, everything in short."

Sainte-Adresse is one of the most striking paintings within this important group of works. In contrast to the majority of seascapes Monet produced at this time, which depict the beach facing southward in the direction of Le Havre, Sainte-Adresse shows the beach facing north toward the cape of La Cape of La Hève at Low Tide (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth), which he exhibited in the Salon of 1865. In Sainte-Adresse, painted two years later, the view has been altered in small yet significant ways: the horizon line has been raised and the cape centered within the composition, giving greater prominence to the beach in the foreground. In addition, the inclusion of boats and the houses in the middle ground make the site look less desolate than in the earlier depictions. The accompanying figures, rather than being dwarfed by the vastness of the surrounding landscape, reside comfortably within it.

In stylistic terms, this painting is consistent with the seascapes Monet produced during the summer and fall of 1867. There is a new awareness of the particular atmospheric character of the scene, reflecting Monet's growing acuity as a landscape painter. The overcast day is skillfully captured through the grayish tonalities of the sky, the water, and the beach. A stronger emphasis is also given to the paint surface, with rapidly applied touches of color that help characterize rather than carefully delineate the scene. The relative simplicity of the composition, the elimination of detail, and the fresh, varied quality of the brushwork all suggest that this painting may have been executed at least in part on site rather than entirely in the studio.

The most salient characteristic, however, is the treatment of the subject itself. Although Sainte-Adresse was a resort suburb, located four kilometers northwest of Le Havre, Monet makes no allusion in the painting to the influx of tourists who visited the Normandy coast every year. As in The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (Art Institute of Chicago), also painted in 1867, in this painting the gray skies, the shoreline studded with small fishing boats, and the presence of the fishermen standing on the beach all seem to suggest the fall months, after the departure of the tourists. These two paintings of quotidian scenes contrast noticeably with Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in which well-dressed tourists sit on the beach, watching the white sails of pleasure craft in the harbor on a clear summer day.

With the generous bequest of Catherine Gamble Curran, Sainte-Adresse has now been fully acquired by the National Gallery of Art. In this painting, Monet chose to celebrate a world rarely seen by tourists, but with which the artist had a long and intimate acquaintance. Joining careful observation of place and season with the perceptive portrayal of everyday life on the Normandy coast, Monet created a truly modern masterpiece.


Artwork overview


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Probably Jean-Baptiste Faure [1830-1914], Paris. Adolphe A. Tavernier, Paris; (his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 6 March 1900, no. 58); Th. Revillon; (his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1 March 1924, no. 25); purchased by V. Revillon. Probably (Durand-Ruel, Paris), in 1959.[1] (sale, Palais Galliera, Paris, 23 November 1965, no. 198). (Fritz and Peter Nathan, Zurich), c. 1967. Catherine G. Curran [1926-2007], New York; gift (partial and promised) 1990 to NGA; gift completed 2008.
[1] The painting was exhibited at Durand-Ruel in 1959.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1959

  • Claude Monet 1840-1926, Galerie Durand-Ruel. Paris, 1959, no. 5, repro.

1991

  • Art for the Nation: Gifts in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1991, unnumbered catalogue, color repro.

2011

  • Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, 2011, no. 29, repro.

2016

  • Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) and The Birth of Impressionism, Musée Fabre, Montpelier; Musée d'Orsay, Paris; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2016-2017, no. 118, repro.

2024

  • L'impressionnisme et la mer [Impressionism and the Sea], Musée des impressionnismes Giverny, 2024, no. 48.

Bibliography

1974

  • Wildenstein, Daniel. Claude Monet. Biographie et catalogue raisonné. 5 vols. Lausanne and Paris, 1974-1991: 1:no. 93.

1997

  • Sainte-Adresse. Sainte-Adresse, 1997: 72-73, repro.

2009

  • Jones, Kimberly. "Claude Monet, Sainte-Adresse." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 40 (Spring 2009): 22-23, repro.

Inscriptions

lower right: Claude Monet

Wikidata ID

Q20188702


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