La Pointe de la Hève, Sainte-Adresse

Monet painted this stretch of the Normandy coast in 1864, in his early twenties, on ground he knew from childhood in nearby Le Havre. It shows the headland of La Heve seen across the breakwaters at Sainte-Adresse, worked up quickly out of doors as a study. From it he built a larger studio version and sent that to the Paris Salon of 1865, the official show that could make a young painter. The two seascapes he hung there got him noticed for the first time. For the Salon picture he changed the scene to explain it: he took out the small rowing boat and added a cart in the shallows with figures and horses on the sand, so anyone could see this was a working shore.