On the Cliff near Dieppe

By the winter of 1897 Monet was in his late fifties and had returned to a stretch of the Normandy coast he had first painted years earlier, the tall chalk cliffs near Dieppe and Pourville. He worked outdoors in the cold and wind, then carried the canvases home to finish in the studio, tuning the colours from memory until the rock and the sea dissolve into a haze of pale, shifting light. There is almost no detail to hold on to, only the mass of the cliff and an endless expanse of water catching the early light. Monet kept this one in his own studio until 1903, when he finally let it go at a charity sale.