Coastal landscape

In the summer of 1864 Monet was 23 and living cheaply on the Normandy coast, at a farm inn called Saint-Siméon above the mouth of the Seine, painting outdoors most days. The Van Gogh Museum dates this rolling dune landscape, with its low trees and turquoise water under a clouded sky, to around then, probably somewhere near Honfleur. There is nobody in it at all, only weather. His friend the painter Frédéric Bazille came out to join him for part of that stay, and the two of them worked the same estuary light. Two seascapes from those months were accepted for the Salon of 1865, the first time his work hung in the official Paris exhibition. The museum bought this canvas in 1996, with support from the Vincent van Gogh Foundation and the Rembrandt Association.