Seacoast at Trouville

At the end of August 1881 Monet went to Trouville, on the Normandy coast, for a short stay, and it went badly. In a letter of 13 September to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, he wrote that bad weather had forced him to cut the trip short and that he had come home without any work to show. Even so, a handful of canvases from those days survive, and this is one of them, signed at the lower right with the date 81. Its subject is a single tree on the coast, bent out of shape by the wind off the sea. The Museum of Fine Arts notes that Monet lost the horizon in a haze of creamy blue strokes, so there is no distance behind the tree and it reads as a flat shape on the surface. The low blue bushes along the bottom repeat the outline of its foliage, and the hummocks of ground lean the same way it does. For all that, the tree barely seems rooted in the soil. The painting passed through collections in Paris and New York before John Pickering Lyman of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, bought it in 1907, and his sister Theodora gave it to the museum in 1919.