Le Soleil Couronné

Le Gray's spectacular marine studies off the Normandy coast are among his most celebrated works. Janis writes of a close variant, The Sun at Zenith, "The image also contains the spontaneity of a drawing; the little boats in the distance might have been made by the hand of an oriental calligrapher. Each form seems like a delicate gesture, and we are reminded of how the painter-printmaker James Abbot MacNeill Whistler would come to love and to emulate such eloquent graphic statements. In the same spirit, Monet in the early 1870s, with one of his most artificial and "oriental" pictures, Impression - Sunrise, Le Havre (1872, Musée Marmottan, Paris) its little boats equally gestural as shapes, would unwittingly give a name to a movement...Even in these large and dramatic prints, we feel united across space with the little boats whose perfectly rendered forms seem to beckon us into halcyon infinities beyond the horizon".