The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse is an oil on canvas dated 1867 and associated with Impressionism, a movement Monet pursued intensely in his early years. The painting shows the shoreline at Sainte-Adresse. In the foreground, fishermen gather beside their boats on the sand, while a bourgeois couple appears in the background. The viewer's attention is thus shared between the labor of those who make their living from the sea and the presence of people of more comfortable means, two worlds sharing the same stretch of coast.

The sky takes up a considerable part of the composition, with a few clouds, and the sea is suggested through sailing boats set against the light. This interest in changing light and the atmosphere of the moment is one of the keys to Impressionism, which aimed to capture immediate visual sensation rather than a detailed and stable landscape.

It is known that Monet painted it during a visit to his aunt, around the same time he made Regatta at Sainte-Adresse from almost identical ground. While that work focuses on the regatta itself, The Beach lingers on everyday life at the water's edge. It was first exhibited in 1876, to favorable reactions, and later entered the collection of Jean-Baptiste Faure, a French singer and art collector. Today it belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, which received it in 1933 as a gift from Annie Swan Coburn, as part of the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.

Painter

Claude Monet

Date

1867

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

758 × 1025 cm

Museum

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Genre

marine art

Depicts

sailboat, bark, beach, sky, Sainte-Adresse, cloud

Share:FacebookWhatsApp