Waves Breaking

By the early 1880s Monet had mostly left figures behind and was painting the thing itself, the weather, the water, the plain force of the sea. This is one of those pictures, almost nothing but a grey-green swell heaving up and breaking, painted along the Normandy coast where he kept returning to work in front of the Channel. There is no boat, no beach party, no anecdote, only the motion of the water caught in loaded restless strokes. He was after the specific look of one stretch of sea under one kind of light, the same instinct that would soon set him painting the same haystack or cathedral over and over. It came to San Francisco as a gift and hangs at the Legion of Honor.