Regatta at Sainte-Adresse
Claude Monet, 1867
Regatta at Sainte-Adresse is an oil-on-canvas painting that Claude Monet made in 1867 in Sainte-Adresse, a well-to-do suburb of Le Havre where his father lived. It shows a sailing race on calm water, with brightly colored sails gathered in the outer harbor and, in the foreground, a beach dotted with holidaymakers: women under parasols, men in hats and small boats drawn up on the sand. Sky and sea are built from quick, broken brushstrokes, typical of Impressionism, which favor the impression of light over precise detail.
The scene also carries a personal backdrop. Monet was short of money at the time and spent that summer with his father and aunt, away from Camille Doncieux and their newborn son, Jean. That absence colors how many viewers read the picture, although the painter himself treated it chiefly as a study of landscape and light.
This canvas is usually considered the companion of The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, now in Chicago. The two share the same dimensions, and their viewpoints differ very little. Here high tide brings out elegant bourgeois spectators on a sunny day; in the other painting, low tide leaves fishing boats on the sand under an overcast sky, among sailors and workers. Monet never showed the two together, so the contrast was probably not meant as a social statement, but as a way of showing how one place could look under different conditions.
The work matters because it brings together key features of early Impressionism: open-air painting, direct observation of light, and everyday leisure as subject. The signature appears at the lower left.
- Painter
- Claude Monet
- Date
- 1867
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 75 × 102 cm
- Museum
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
- Movement
- Impressionism
- Genre
- marine art
- Depicts
- sailboat, marine art, church building, parasol, boat, beach, woman, Sainte-Adresse
More works by Claude Monet
