エトルタ、荒れる海

Monet painted this in February 1883, watching a winter storm batter the Normandy coast from the window of his hotel at Etretat. Down on the shingle two fishermen stand by a boat, and beside them sit a few caloges, old worn-out hulls turned upside down and used as sheds for gear. Behind them the famous chalk cliff rises into a curtain of rain, its layers picked out in long horizontal strokes, while the sea heaves up the middle of the picture in quick pearly curls. Monet came back to Etretat again and again in these years, drawn to the same cliffs in every kind of weather. The Paris dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought this one, and it reached the museum in Lyon in 1902.