The Manneporte near Étretat

In September 1886 the writer Guy de Maupassant described what he had watched on the beach at Étretat, on the Normandy coast. Monet walked along the shore, he wrote, followed by children carrying five or six canvases of the same view at different hours, and he took one up and set another aside as the sky and the shadows changed. This canvas, signed and dated '86 in the lower left corner, comes straight out of that way of working. Its subject is the Manneporte, a huge natural arch in the chalk cliff. Monet painted it from this angle six times, two on each of three trips to the coast, in 1883, 1885 and 1886, and he finished the pictures later in his studio. The Met owns two of the six, and this is the upright one. In 1892 the Chicago collector Potter Palmer bought it from Monet's dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, then handed it back the following January, and it reached the Met in 1931 through the bequest of the New York collector Lillie P. Bliss.