The Beach at Honfleur

Monet was 23 in the summer of 1864, and he spent it, and much of the autumn, at Honfleur on the Normandy side of the Seine estuary. Eugène Boudin and the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind were working the same coast that season, and the Ferme Saint-Siméon, a cider farm on the hill above the port, was where that company gathered. The two large seascapes that came out of those months were finished back in a Paris studio over the following winter and got him into the Salon of 1865, his first acceptance there. This canvas is catalogued in Los Angeles as 1864 to 1866. It looks along the working shore under the Côte de Grâce, with sailing boats out on the water, the town hospital and a lighthouse small in the distance, and one man in a blue workman's smock standing at the foot of the chalk bank.