Ausgehöhlte Klippe bei Étretat

Etretat was a working fishing beach before it was a view. The boats drawn up on the shingle are the local caiques, kept there because the place has no harbour, and further along that beach old hulls were turned upside down and thatched over as sheds for nets and tackle. Monet spent the winter of 1883 here, lodging at the Hotel Blanquet by the shore, and came back twice in the years that followed. He was working in the shadow of Courbet, who had painted these same cliffs in 1869, and alongside a summer resort trade that took the beach over every season. The arch on the right is the Porte d'Aval. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which dates the canvas 1884, bought it in 1961.