Port-Coton, Le Lion

Monet crossed to Belle-Île, off the south coast of Brittany, in the middle of September 1886, meaning to stay a fortnight. He stayed until the end of November. He took lodgings at Kervilahouen, a hamlet of a few houses on the western side, which faces open Atlantic along a stretch the islanders called the terrible sea, and his letters home are full of the wind and the rain and how hard the place was to paint. He came back with about 39 canvases. Most of them are rock, the needles at Port-Coton worked over and over at different tides and hours, and this one takes the outlying block the islanders call the Lion. The critic Gustave Geffroy was on the island that autumn, met Monet there, and went on to write the first full life of him.