The Cliff of Aval, Etrétat

Monet worked at Etretat on the Normandy coast through the autumn of 1885, staying in a small hotel on the beach and going out after the same cliffs in changing weather. Guy de Maupassant was there at the same time and described it in a newspaper piece the following year. Monet had stopped being a painter, he wrote, and had turned into a hunter, walking the shingle with children carrying five or six canvases of the same subject behind him, swapping one for the next as the light shifted. The Falaise d'Aval is the arch at the southern end of the bay, with the tall needle of rock standing just off it. He made close to 50 paintings on that coast between October and December, and in late November a wave caught him at work on the rocks and nearly took him and his easel out to sea.