La Falaise à Pourville

In January 1882 the Paris bank Union Generale collapsed and pulled much of the market down with it. Monet's dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was nearly ruined, and part of the reason Monet went off to the Normandy coast in February was to produce enough canvases to keep that arrangement alive. He settled at Pourville, a fishing village near Dieppe, stayed until the middle of April, and came back in June for the summer. He signed this one at the lower right, Claude Monet 82. The grass along the cliff edge is painted sharply while the sea, the sky and the far side of the bay are left soft, the way a photograph goes out of focus behind its subject. The Metropolitan Museum in New York owned the picture from 1956 until 2014, when it was sold and came to Potsdam.