Fishing Boats in Étretat

Monet returned to Étretat in the autumn of 1885 and stayed into the winter, working on the shingle among the fishing boats the crews hauled out of the water each day. The village was by then a working fishing station and a fashionable place to bathe at the same time. He wrote almost daily to Alice Hoschedé, his companion, about the weather, and in one letter that November he described being caught by a wave near the Manneport arch, thrown against the cliff and dragged into the freezing sea along with his canvas and his paints, all of it lost. He went back out and kept painting. This is the only Monet the Seattle Art Museum owns, a gift from Sarah Hart.