How Claude Monet captured his favourite spot on the French coast in Bord des falaises à Pourville

In the 1870s, Claude Monet was acquainted with financial hardship. For much of the decade, France experienced an economic recession. What’s more, Impressionist painting, the first exhibition of which was held in 1874, found few early fans or collectors. Monet sent numerous letters to friends, pleading for money with which to pay his rent or buy art materials.

Things began to look up at the start of the next decade, however — in part, because the Impressionists’ great champion, the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, was able to purchase their works on a large scale for the first time in years, having negotiated a substantial cash advance from the Union Générale bank.

Monet could duly afford to move into a new home, in the town of Poissy on the River Seine, in 1881, and to undertake several painting trips to the Normandy coast. These included two notable campaigns at a spot called Pourville in 1882: one between February and April, the other from June to October.

Captivated by the scenery he encountered, Monet produced a total of 100 paintings there, capturing the coast in both turbulence and tranquillity, under dark clouds and blue skies.

A standout example, Bord des falaises à Pourville (‘Edge of the cliffs at Pourville’), is being offered as the top lot in Durand-Ruel, Generations of Vision on 22 October 2026 at Christie’s in Paris — a sale of artworks that were acquired by Durand-Ruel or his heirs, and kept in the family collection.

The picture has not appeared on the market since the dealer bought it in the late 19th century, passing from one generation to the next by descent — until now.

Bord des falaises à Pourville is considered the sister painting to a work with a near-identical viewpoint, today found in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam. Many of Monet’s Pourville pictures are held in institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Japan’s Tokyo Fuji Art Museum and The Cleveland Museum of Art.

When he set out for the Alabaster Coast in Normandy — some 80 miles of shoreline, so called because of its sheer white-chalk cliffs — Monet’s plan was to paint the landscape in and around Dieppe. Upon arrival, however, he explained in a letter to his partner, Alice Hoschedé, who was back in Poissy, that ‘nothing really seizes my imagination here’.

Within a week, he relocated from Dieppe to the picturesque fishing village of Pourville, three miles west. The place was instantly to his liking — ‘the countryside is very beautiful’, he told Alice in another letter. At the cost of six francs a day, full board, he stayed in a restaurant-hotel whose friendly owner — a chef called Paul Antoine Graff — he portrayed in an affectionate painting now housed at the Belvedere in Vienna.

In his own words, Monet ‘worked tirelessly’ on landscapes of the cliffs and beaches around Pourville. A handful of these were included in the seventh Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris in March 1882.

Reviewing the show in Paris-Journal, the critic Ernest Chesneau praised the way Monet had ‘rendered, with such extraordinary power of illusion, the upswells and long descending sighs of the ocean, the rivulets of the eddying waves, the glaucous surface of deep water, and the violet hues of the low tide above its bed of sand’.

After returning to Poissy for a few weeks in the spring, Monet was keen to pay a second visit to Pourville as soon as possible. He did so this time en famille, accompanied by Michel and Jean (the sons he had had with his late wife Camille), Alice, and her six children from her marriage to the department store owner Ernest Hoschedé.

Graff’s hotel wasn’t big enough to accommodate all 10 guests, so Monet rented a house for the summer called Villa Juliette. This was set high upon the cliffs, and is visible in the middle distance in the painting Pourville, which was sold at Christie’s in London in 2011.

In the works from Monet’s second stay in the village, the colours are brighter, and the hills covered in more flowers, than in the pictures from the start of the year. Bord des falaises à Pourville is one such work. To paint it, Monet placed his easel close to Villa Juliette, taking a sweeping view towards the majestic cliffs of Varengeville to the west.

These, like the sea beneath them and the sky above, are somewhat blurred — in contrast to the grassy cliff edge directly before us, which is in sharper focus, captured in an array of green, pink, white, yellow and ochre strokes. It appears to be early afternoon, and Monet conveys shimmering summer light.

There are a few hints of human life, but not many: some houses in the background on the far left, and five white flecks in the water, representing sailing boats. The sea is calm, its turquoise colour reflected in streaks of blue in the Varengeville cliffs.

With his multiple pictures of Pourville, painted in different seasons in varying light conditions, Monet was in some ways anticipating the serial working practice of later in his career. This would see him produce famous series of depictions of the same subject (such as Rouen Cathedral and the haystacks in a field near his home) at different moments.

Durand-Ruel briefly travelled to Pourville during Monet’s second stay there, and was impressed enough by the latter’s seascapes to tell him: ‘You have never been on a surer course, or in finer creative form.’

It was around this time that the dealer also provided Monet with a major commission, one that would engage him across the following three years: a group of 36 canvases to decorate the door panels in Durand-Ruel’s Paris apartment. In most cases, these were floral still lifes, and one of them — Trois pots de tulipes (1885), which depicts three terracotta pots containing a pair of red tulips, a white tulip and a yellow chrysanthemum — is being offered in Durand-Ruel, Generations of Vision.

Back outdoors, Monet would eventually paint a number of spots on the Normandy coast, from Etretat to Fécamp. Pourville seems to have been his favourite, though, judging by the fact that he returned there for two further work trips, in 1896 and 1897. He had ‘a longing to see [that] sea again’, as he told Durand-Ruel in a letter. ‘I’m delighted to revisit so many of the places I painted 15 years ago,’ he added — even if his delight was tempered by learning that both Graff and his wife had died in the early 1890s.

Monet once said that ‘nature [is] the source of my inspiration’, and he was wont to work on a landscape painting for 10 to 12 sessions en plein air before finishing it off in the studio. In the case of Bord des falaises à Pourville, he distilled geological, botanical, tidal and human time into a single moment, one summer’s day in Normandy, capturing that moment forever on canvas.

Durand-Ruel, Generations of Vision will be on view at Christie’s in Paris, 16-22 October 2026. Highlights from the collection will be touring to New York (17-20 September), Hong Kong (24-29 September) and London (8-12 October)

Related artists: Claude Monet