Part 1 of this post features the Étretat works of Delacroix, Corbet, and Boudin. Part 2 features the Étretat works of Monet.
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| Claude Monet |
Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was the original founder and practitioner of the French Impressionist movement in painting. Some of his best-known works include Impression, Sunrise (for which the movement was named), the Water Lilies series, and the Haystacks series.
During the 1880s, Monet rediscovered the Normandy coast and made repeated visits there to draw by the sea. Étretat had already been painted by both Delacroix and Courbet; Monet in fact owned a Delacroix watercolour of the area. The Courbet retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1882 featured a group of Étretat seascapes. Monet visited Étretat in 1883 with plans to create his own Normandy seascapes: “I reckon on doing a big canvas on the cliff of Étretat, although it’s terribly audacious of me to do that after Courbet who did it so well, but I’ll try to do it differently.” The region had become a fashionable holiday destination for Parisians, which may have encouraged Monet to create paintings for a growing market.
In the 1890s, Monet began producing his series paintings: multiple images of the same subject done at different times of day and captured in different kinds of light. In the 1880s, Monet painted and drew the coast north of Le Havre at Étretat repeatedly, and the body of work he produced shows that he was already thinking in terms of repeated representations of the same subject. Some of the pieces shown here are in pastel, a medium that enabled Monet to note down ideas for composition and colour with speed.
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| 1873 The Porte d'Amont, Étretat oil on canvas |
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| 1883 Étretat, Rough Sea oil on canvas |
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| 1883 Étretat, Sunset oil on canvas |
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| 1883 The Cliff at Étretat oil on canvas |
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| 1883 The Manneport, Étretat oil on canvas |
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| 1883 The Manneport, Seen from Below oil on canvas 72 x 91 cm |
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| 1883 The Needle of Étretat, Low Tide oil on canvas 60 x 81 cm |
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| 1885 Étretat, the Aval Cliff, the Effect of the Sun oil on canvas 60 x 73 cm |
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| 1885 Étretat, the Porte d'Aval oil on canvas 60 x 81 cm |
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| 1885 The Manneport at High Tide oil on canvas 165.1 x 205.7 cm |
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| 1885 The Manneport Seen from the East oil on canvas 166.4 x 206.5 cm |
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| 1885 The Rock Needle and the Porte d'Aval oil on canvas 165.1 x 81 cm |
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| 1885 The Rock Needle Seen through the Porte d'Aumont oil on canvas 185.4 x 152.4 cm |
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| 1885-86 Étretat in the Rain oil on canvas 142.2 x 209.6 cm |
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| 1885-86 The Rock Needle Seen through the Porte d'Aval oil on canvas 73 x 92 cm |
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| c1885 Étretat, the Port d'Aval, Fishing Boats leaving the Harbour oil on wood |
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| 1885c Étretat, The Arch, and the Aval Cliff pastel 21 x 37 cm cm |
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| c1885 Étretat, the Manneporte at Low Tide pastel 23 x 33 cm |
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| c1885 Étretat, the Needle Rock and Porte d'Aval pastel 40 x 23.5 cm |
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| Étretat, Beach and Falaise d'Aval oil on canvas |
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| Étretat, The End of the Day oil on canvas |
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| Étretat, the Manneporte Reflected on Water oil on canvas |
