Rocce a Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île

Monet went to Belle-Ile, off the south coast of Brittany, in September 1886, meaning to stay about ten days. He stayed more than two months and came home with roughly 39 canvases. The Atlantic there behaves nothing like the Channel coast he knew. He wrote about wind that knocked the easel over and rain that kept him indoors, and he paid a local fisherman to haul his gear along the cliffs.

At the inn in the hamlet of Kervilahouen he fell into conversation with another guest, the critic Gustave Geffroy. The acquaintance lasted the rest of Monet's life. Geffroy wrote the first substantial book about him and introduced him to Georges Clemenceau, the politician who decades later pressed the French state into taking the large water-lily panels.

Port-Goulphar is a narrow inlet on the island's exposed seaward side, which is why he kept coming back to it.