La Plage de Pourville

In September 2000 this canvas vanished from the National Museum in Poznań. A thief had cut it from its frame and slipped a copy painted on cardboard into its place, and the swap held long enough for him to walk out. It was ten years before the police found the original and brought it back. That was only the latest chapter. The museum had bought it in 1906, then lost it to the German occupation in the war. After 1943 it was hidden, shipped into Germany, found by Red Army troops in Saxony in 1945, and not returned to Poland until 1956. Monet himself painted it in a much calmer moment, in 1882, on the cliffs above Pourville, a small resort near Dieppe on the Normandy coast, working fast to catch the light over an empty beach. The two figures on the headland are barely more than a few strokes, turned away from us toward the water, the way people actually stand when they have stopped to look at the sea.