Claude Monet : “The Manneporte near Etretat” (1886)

Monet often worked in series, painting the same subject under different conditions. He explained that, “For me, a landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape, because its appearance is constantly changing; but it lives by virtue of its surroundings, the air and the light which vary continually.” The motif was therefore insignificant. “What I want,” he said, “is to reproduce what exists between the motif and me.”

The Manneporte is the largest of three natural arch formations on the Normandy coast near Étretat. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monet painted it “six times from this angle: twice during each of three visits to the Normandy coast in 1883, 1885 and 1886.” The writer Guy de Maupassant observed him at work during his 1886 excursion, writing that “the artist walked along the beach, followed by children carrying five or six canvases representing the same subject at different times of the day and with different effects. He took them up and put them aside by turns according to changes in the sky and shadows.”

Like many of the French Impressionists, Monet was enamored of Japanese art and printmaking, and may have drawn inspiration for this composition from Hiroshige’s 1853 print, The Entrance to the Cave at Enoshima Island in Sagami Province. The National Gallery in Washington notes that in both works “the rock arch is cut by the frame, and seems both to plunge into the sea and to thrust upwards, while water surges around the base of the arch and isolated rocks,” each containing “minute figures that indicate the mighty scale” of the formation.