Title: Bateaux de pêche, temps calme
Artist: Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926)
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 64.1 x 54 cm
Date Created: 1868
Description
Monet’s artistic journey began along the Normandy coast. Throughout the 1860s, he painted each summer in Sainte-Adresse near Le Havre, submitting significant coastal scenes to the Salon to declare his ambitions as a painter of the sea. Though later based in Argenteuil near Paris, he returned annually to his native coast between 1880 and 1886, producing nearly one hundred and fifty seascapes. In 1889, he confessed to remaining “faithful to that sea in front of which I grew up.” In 1917, the elderly Monet made a final pilgrimage to the Normandy shores not to paint, but simply to gaze upon the sea that held his memories.
Bateaux de pêche, temps calme was painted at Étretat between autumn 1868 and spring 1869. Settling there with his family, Monet wrote to his friend Bazille: “I am surrounded by all the things that I love… My desire would be to remain forever in a nice corner of nature like this one.” The composition breaks from tradition—a vertical format with an elevated vantage point and a nearly indistinguishable horizon accentuates the sea’s depth. The foreground fishing boats are rendered disproportionately large, creating a powerful spatial recession. The brushwork is broad and liberated, the pigment applied in bold, bravura strokes that foreshadow a central tenet of Impressionism: capturing a spontaneous visual impression before nature.
Art historian Robert Herbert observed that at Étretat, Monet was “sharing in the development of Impressionism’s key feature: exposed brushwork that seems to capture a new spontaneity of vision in front of nature.” The painting’s first owner was the critic Théodore Duret, called “the first conscientious historian of Impressionism.” Duret acquired the work in 1873 and retained it even when dispersing much of his collection in 1894. It later entered the collection of James Sutton, a founder of the American Art Association and a key figure in introducing Impressionism to New York.
Image Download
Image Dimensions: 2663 x 3200 pixels
Image Size: 1008 KB
Image Format: JPG
Print Resolution: 300 dpi
Download Format: ZIP Archive
License: Public Domain, Free for Commercial Use
