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拍品专文
In February of 1896, Monet returned to the Normandy coast for the first time in ten years. He left Giverny for Pourville, a seaside village about halfway between Fécamp and Dieppe, "to gain strength from the sea air" as he told the dealer Maurice Joyant (quoted in H. Lemonedes et al, Monet in Normandy, San Francisco, 2006, p. 156). Monet revisited many of the sites that he had painted on his annual campaigns along the coast between 1880 and 1886, including Pourville, Varengeville, Etretat, and Dieppe. He sought to express the towering cliffs and sprawling beaches that he had captured numerous times before in order "to resume in one or two canvases my past impressions and sensations," as he told one interviewer (ibid.). Writing to Durand-Ruel from Pourville, Monet remarked, "I needed to see the sea again and am enchanted to see again so many things I made fifteen years ago. And so I have set to work with ardor" (ibid.).
Forced to switch towns and paintings with the whims of the fickle midwinter weather, Monet passed six and a half weeks depicting sites along the coast between Pourville and Varengeville. The present painting depicts one of Pourville's striated limestone cliffs as viewed from the beach. The flecks of pink, purple, and blue in this work suggest the diffuse sunshine of a bright yet overcast day. Although plagued by storms, Monet wrote to Durand-Ruel from Giverny that he was "driven from Pourville by an impossible weather, but very pleased to have gone there and intend to return there to pass the next winter" (ibid.).
Monet's coastal landscapes from 1896-97 have often been compared with a group of landscapes that Edgar Degas exhibited at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in the autumn of 1892. These colored monotypes, which he heightened with pastel, depict simple views of the Norman coastline without figures or identifiable buildings (fig. 1). The softly blurred, generalized forms of these works focus attention on color and form so that the depicted scene transcends the details of literal representation. Degas' focus on abstract form and light likely spoke to Monet, who had spent the early 1890s painting series of grain stacks in a field near Giverny as well as the fagade of Rouen cathedral. The softly luminous appearance of Monet's paintings from 1896-97 reflect the painter's shifting artistic concerns and growing interest in the expressive qualities of tone, hue, and touch. He would push these qualities to the limits of representation in scenes of his garden at Giverny. Commenting on the artistic import of Monet's coastal views from this period, Richard Bretell has written: "Indeed, Normandy, that place in which Monet's career as a modern artist had incubated, had transformed itself through the example of Degas into a pictorial scaffolding for his experiments with what critics then called "pure" color, paint, and light. Monet retreated further and further from locative reality into memory and imagination, and his final Norman retreat took him from the landscape itself into his own garden" (in ibid., pp. 38-39).
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Côte Rocheuse, c.1890-92. Private collection. BARCODE 25010435
Forced to switch towns and paintings with the whims of the fickle midwinter weather, Monet passed six and a half weeks depicting sites along the coast between Pourville and Varengeville. The present painting depicts one of Pourville's striated limestone cliffs as viewed from the beach. The flecks of pink, purple, and blue in this work suggest the diffuse sunshine of a bright yet overcast day. Although plagued by storms, Monet wrote to Durand-Ruel from Giverny that he was "driven from Pourville by an impossible weather, but very pleased to have gone there and intend to return there to pass the next winter" (ibid.).
Monet's coastal landscapes from 1896-97 have often been compared with a group of landscapes that Edgar Degas exhibited at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in the autumn of 1892. These colored monotypes, which he heightened with pastel, depict simple views of the Norman coastline without figures or identifiable buildings (fig. 1). The softly blurred, generalized forms of these works focus attention on color and form so that the depicted scene transcends the details of literal representation. Degas' focus on abstract form and light likely spoke to Monet, who had spent the early 1890s painting series of grain stacks in a field near Giverny as well as the fagade of Rouen cathedral. The softly luminous appearance of Monet's paintings from 1896-97 reflect the painter's shifting artistic concerns and growing interest in the expressive qualities of tone, hue, and touch. He would push these qualities to the limits of representation in scenes of his garden at Giverny. Commenting on the artistic import of Monet's coastal views from this period, Richard Bretell has written: "Indeed, Normandy, that place in which Monet's career as a modern artist had incubated, had transformed itself through the example of Degas into a pictorial scaffolding for his experiments with what critics then called "pure" color, paint, and light. Monet retreated further and further from locative reality into memory and imagination, and his final Norman retreat took him from the landscape itself into his own garden" (in ibid., pp. 38-39).
(fig. 1) Edgar Degas, Côte Rocheuse, c.1890-92. Private collection. BARCODE 25010435