拍品專文
Prompted by his desire to escape the difficulties in his personal life and to "gain strength from the sea air," Monet returned to the Normandy coast in Feburary 1896, where he had previously visited in the early 1880s. This time Monet chose to concentrate his artistic efforts on views of the coastline as it swept westward from Pourville. These views of Pourville, the Val Saint-Nicholas at Dieppe, and the gorge and headlands of the Petit Ailly at Varengeville constitute three series that Monet combined under the title Falaises when he exhibited twenty-four of the works at Galerie Georges Petit in 1898.
Unlike the dramatic confrontation between cliff and sea of his previous depictions of Normandy, Prs Dieppe, reflets sur la mer is characterized by "pastel colors and softer, less defined contours, and by arabesques that play across the surface. As a result, the bulges and hollows which in 1882 evoke a whole variety of spatial and emotional responses, now read as decorative surfaces of nearly the same mood" (R. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast, Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886, New Haven and London, 1994, p. 56).
The view in the present painting is closer to the cliffs than other works from this period. This radically reductive viewpoint was likely to have been inspired by Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai. As William Seitz observed:
The radical cropping calls to mind Japanese prints, of which Monet became an avid collector, the surface is often divided into very few large areas. Horizontal recessions are avoided or gently coerced toward the vertical. Within the thoughtfully contoured shapes a broad vocabulary of coloristic calligraphy simultaneously translates into pigment both the vibration of light and the rhythms and textures of grasses, earth, clouds, foliage, rock surfaces, and waves (W.C. Seitz, Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1960, p. 16).
Unlike the dramatic confrontation between cliff and sea of his previous depictions of Normandy, Prs Dieppe, reflets sur la mer is characterized by "pastel colors and softer, less defined contours, and by arabesques that play across the surface. As a result, the bulges and hollows which in 1882 evoke a whole variety of spatial and emotional responses, now read as decorative surfaces of nearly the same mood" (R. Herbert, Monet on the Normandy Coast, Tourism and Painting, 1867-1886, New Haven and London, 1994, p. 56).
The view in the present painting is closer to the cliffs than other works from this period. This radically reductive viewpoint was likely to have been inspired by Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai. As William Seitz observed:
The radical cropping calls to mind Japanese prints, of which Monet became an avid collector, the surface is often divided into very few large areas. Horizontal recessions are avoided or gently coerced toward the vertical. Within the thoughtfully contoured shapes a broad vocabulary of coloristic calligraphy simultaneously translates into pigment both the vibration of light and the rhythms and textures of grasses, earth, clouds, foliage, rock surfaces, and waves (W.C. Seitz, Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1960, p. 16).