Die ruhige See

Courbet spent the late summer of 1869 at Étretat, on the Normandy coast, and mostly he painted the sea at its most violent, great green waves rearing up and breaking, the pictures that would make his marines famous. This one is the opposite. The tide has gone out, two small fishing boats sit beached on the wet sand, and a huge quiet sky presses down over thin bands of water and shore. There is almost no drama in it. He was looking straight out over the English Channel in August, catching the coast in one of its flat, still moods rather than its storms. A few years later Monet and the younger painters who came after would work this same stretch of shore, chasing exactly this kind of ordinary weather and light.