Acantilados en Pourville, amanecer

Monet came back to this stretch of the Normandy coast in the winters of 1896 and 1897, to cliffs he had first painted in 1882. What changed was the method. In 1882 he made single views of the place. Fifteen years later he set several canvases going at once and moved between them as the light shifted, and this sunrise belongs to a group of five worked between January and March 1897.

Paris was arguing about him that same February. The collection Gustave Caillebotte had left to the French state opened at the Musée du Luxembourg over loud protest from academic painters, so Monet's work went up in a state museum while he was out on a cliff edge before first light. He later showed the whole run of cliff pictures in Paris under one title, Falaises.