Regatta at Sainte-Adresse

Monet spent the summer of 1867 at Sainte-Adresse, the seaside town near Le Havre where his father kept a house. He was 26, short of money, and had a pregnant partner his family disapproved of back in Paris, so the visit was partly a truce. He worked hard through it. In late June he wrote that he had about twenty pictures under way, among them the regattas of Le Havre with the harbour full of small sails. This is one of them, watched at high tide by well-dressed holidaymakers on the shore. The man standing in a grey suit and straw hat is thought to be his father. Monet seems to have planned it as a pair with a greyer, low-tide beach scene of fishermen, now in Chicago, the same stretch of coast in a plainer mood.