Lot Essay
Monet left Dieppe in February 1882 to the small coastal resort of Pourville, where he found the small port less pretentious and the scenery more impressive. Here he painted a series of scenes on the beach leading towards Varengeville. Falaises Pourville was painted below the cliffs of Varengeville looking back towards Pourville, with the Falaise d'Amont running to the left. The composition is virtually identical to Falaises, temps gris in a private Swiss collection (Wildenstein, no. 720).
Concerning Monet's works at Pourville, Paul Tucker has written:
From here on, he was going to allow nature to speak on her own about her awesome powers and boundless splendor. Her chiaroscuro, therefore, would be hailed as both concrete and otherworldly...her immensity and grandeur celebrated in the ever-expanding breadth of views...her intricate wholeness subtly suggested by the interrelationship of individual parts of pictures...The Human would always have a place in this new enterprise, whether explicitly in the figures Monet often includes or by implication, as in the houses, boats or other man-made artifacts that appear in his scenes. Even the immediacy of his forms and the physicality of his touch allow one to sense Monet's presence in the picture and thus that of an individual standing on this site as a surrogate for the viewer. For the energy he once found in the contradictions of contemporaneity were now to be discovered in the magisterial way in which rocks meet water and land reaches to sky. (P. Tucker, Claude Monet, Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 111)
Concerning Monet's works at Pourville, Paul Tucker has written:
From here on, he was going to allow nature to speak on her own about her awesome powers and boundless splendor. Her chiaroscuro, therefore, would be hailed as both concrete and otherworldly...her immensity and grandeur celebrated in the ever-expanding breadth of views...her intricate wholeness subtly suggested by the interrelationship of individual parts of pictures...The Human would always have a place in this new enterprise, whether explicitly in the figures Monet often includes or by implication, as in the houses, boats or other man-made artifacts that appear in his scenes. Even the immediacy of his forms and the physicality of his touch allow one to sense Monet's presence in the picture and thus that of an individual standing on this site as a surrogate for the viewer. For the energy he once found in the contradictions of contemporaneity were now to be discovered in the magisterial way in which rocks meet water and land reaches to sky. (P. Tucker, Claude Monet, Life and Art, New Haven, 1995, p. 111)