The island’s landscape is depicted with steep cliffs and rocky coasts, among them the rocks Port Domois and Port Coton, named ‘coton’ (cotton) after the white foam from the waves continuously crashing high against the rocks. Five paintings originate from Port Domois.
Besides painting the dangerous and sharp edges, Monet also painted the imposing heights, the sea, the tides crashing against the rock formations of the majestic coast, and the small ports and beaches of the island.
The exceptional rendition not only captures the inimitability of remarkable geology, but also of the tumultuousness of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is apparent in all the Belle-Île paintings that the highly-placed horizon leaves little room for the sky, and that the painter focused primarily on the fight between the water and the rocks. Thus, it is difficult to gauge the weather conditions of a painting, despite weather being a focal point in many of Monet’s works.
The paintings are colourful; the rocks, as much as the sea, are done in blue, green, and violet tones. The relatively dark colours generate a menacing atmosphere, an accurate rendition of the island’s character.
In comparison to the paintings The Rocks at Belle-Île (1886, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), The Port-Coton ‘Pyramids’ (1886, Gustave Rau Collection), and Rocks at Port-Coton, the Lion Rock, Belle-Île (vol. 1, p. 230), the painting Port-Domois, Belle-Île (vol. 1, p. 232) portrays a more tranquil image of the sea.
Daniel Wildenstein calls the Moscow painting Pyramids of Porte-Coton. Stormy Sea. Marine subjects play a prominent part in Monet’s œuvre.
The artist’s love of the sea was probably awakened when he lived in Le Havre, where he learned the rudiments of painting under Eugène Boudin.
Kolsaas Mountain, 1895.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 92 cm. Private collection, US.
Valley of the Creuse (Gray Day), 1889.
Oil on canvas, 65.5 × 81.2 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Heavy Sea at Pourville, 1897. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 101 cm.
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
Monet painted seascapes all his life, but the best of them are those produced in the 1880s at Belle-Île and Étretat. In September and October 1886 the artist worked at picturesque Belle-Île and it was then, in all likelihood, that the Moscow canvas was painted. The gloom of the place invested the painting with a stern atmosphere; the colours are harsh and clashing patches of white, blue, green and brownish-violet, are applied in energetic, almost impasted strokes of varying sizes and shapes.
This dynamic handling evokes a sense of restless motion, the elements ever at work and the sea never the same. The mercurial sea is the keynote of the painting, everything else – the artist’s usual interest in the intricate play of reflected sunshine, the effects of light on colours, etc. – being less significant.
Monet was completely captivated by the stern romance of the sea and rocks. This spot was painted by Monet time and again, therefore versions of the motif are to be found in many collections in different parts of the world.
The same year, 1886, Monet portrayed the sea at Belle-Île in three other pictures, two of which are in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and one in a private collection in Copenhagen. Besides the Copenhagen painting, those depicting the cliffs of Belle-Île are also similar to the Moscow marine picture.
In Brittany he was moved by the region’s singularity and severity, writing to Durand-Ruel: “I am doing a lot of work; this place is very beautiful, but wild, yet for all that the sea is incomparable, surrounded by fantastic crags.”
As a result of his daily contact with Nature, Monet gained insight into her peculiarities, and he created landscapes in which concretely observed, unique features are combined with attempts at generalisation. One such work is the landscape The Rocks at Belle-Île (1886, Pushkin Museum, Moscow), in which he depicts the jagged, windswept crags of the Brittany coast, the white crests of the foaming water, and, beyond, the boundless sea, which seems almost to flow into the sky at the horizon.
This is indeed Brittany, but not only Brittany – it is the sea in general, its endlessness, its eternal battle with dry land. The painting is executed in varied, sensitive strokes, strictly following the form of the object portrayed – in this case, the cliffs. Monet set himself a rather different task in a landscape painted in that same year of 1886, Cliffs at Étretat (Pushkin Museum, Moscow). Here too, the viewer is presented with a wide expanse of sea, bounded to the left by the line of the shore which rises up into blue cliffs.
Val-Saint-Nicolas, near Dieppe (Morning), 1897.
Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 100 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Steep Cliffs near Dieppe, 1897. Oil on canvas, 65 × 100.5 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
How different the treatment of these cliffs is, however! The crags are removed from the foreground, and the shoreline in front them is quite without substance; all sense of the solidity of the rocks is lost.
The water has none of the mobility and weightiness which are so masterfully brought out in the other paintings. The artist’s attention is concentrated on representing the atmosphere and vibrations in the air which is itself filled with the play of golden-yellow light. The brushwork is matt and pale, with the strokes playing a dematerialising role rather than serving to create form.
Monet made his second trip through the south of France in 1888. He stopped off at Antibes, which welcomed him with a winter rainstorm. When the weather was back to normal and the painter was able to work, the southern light enchanted him all over again. This time his range of colours, based on the most delicately graded nuances of blue and pink, gave his oil painting the look of pastel. “I’m painting the town of Antibes,” he wrote Alice, “a little fortified town, all golden in the sun, standing out against beautiful blue-and-pink mountains and the chain of the Alps forever covered with snow.”
Wherever he worked, Monet did not forget his family. “So know once and for all that you are my whole life, along with my children,” he wrote to Alice from Bordighera, “and while I work I never stop thinking of you. This is so true that, with every motif that I do, that I choose, I say to myself I must render it really well, so you can see where I was and what it’s like.”
However they were not truly a happy family until after the death of Ernest Hoschedé in 1892. The marriage of Alice and Claude Monet took place at Giverny on 16 July 1892.
Ten years earlier, in 1883, Monet had bought a house in the village of Giverny, near the little town of Vernon. The house was located on the right bank of the Seine, where its tributary the Epte rushes into the river, right at the border of Normandy and the Île-de-France.
Monet remained fond of the Seine all his life. “I’ve never grown weary of it,” he said later. “It’s always new for me.” It followed naturally that his search for a new home would lead them there. “What enchanted Monet,” recounted Alice’s youngest son, “was the view of the magnificent horizon on which Giverny opens its windows.”
Monet looked at the world with a painter’s eyes, and there were so many motifs for him there. “In between all these bodies of water, great natural grasslands spread out, lushly blooming and ringed with poplar trees,” wrote Jean-Pierre Hoschedé. “Slightly elevated, facing south and running lengthwise over several kilometres, the village stretches