Les Barques à Étretat

Monet spent the autumn of 1885 at Étretat on the Normandy coast, in a room at the Hôtel Blanquet above the beach. The weather turned and kept him indoors, so he painted through the window. On 24 November he wrote to Alice Hoschedé, his companion and later his wife, that he had spent the afternoon working in his room on his caloges in the rain, and had then tried a picture of the boats leaving, again through the glass. A caloge is a retired fishing boat turned into a storehouse, the hull roofed over with tarred planks, and they stood along the shingle at Étretat then. The second picture he mentions in that letter, The Departure of the Boats, hangs in the same museum in Chicago. In both he worked pale blues, pinks, purples and greens into the look of wet surfaces.