Cottage on the Cliffs near Varengeville

The little cabin perched on these Normandy cliffs was not built for the view. Huts like it went up along this coast during the Napoleonic wars, lookout posts where customs men watched the Channel for English ships. By Monet's day it had long lost that job. He had first painted these cliffs near Varengeville, just west of Dieppe, in 1882. In 1896, in his mid-fifties and by then famous for painting the same haystack or cathedral again and again in changing light, he came back to do the same with this coast, a motif he had left 14 years earlier. What he was after here was the weather and the hour, the grey-green sea, the chalk cliff, the grass on the headland. The canvas belongs to that late Normandy group and now hangs in Copenhagen.