The Nets, Honfleur

Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, is where French painting first learned to chase the weather. Eugene Boudin worked its beaches back in the 1860s and the young Claude Monet followed him there, both hunting the fleeting light over the Seine estuary. Vallotton kept a house in the same town and came back for his holidays, and in 1912 he painted this coast doing the opposite of catching a passing moment. He turns his back on the picturesque harbour and gives us a bare, weather-beaten stretch of shore under a heavy, rain-dark sky, a line of trees standing along it like petrified silhouettes. He built landscapes like this away from the motif, composed rather than observed, which is why everything holds so still. One gap in the clouds lets the light down, and it catches the top edge of the fishing nets hung to dry on their sticks, turning them almost turquoise, and touches the road where two small figures walk on alone.