English: Claude Monet

French, 1840-1926

Oil on canvas

Gift of Emily Sibley Watson, 39.22;

This painting belongs to a series of works produced during the spring and summer of 1883, while Monet visited Pourville, a town on the Normandy coust. As he explored the beach and the rocks exposed at low tide, Monet found a startling diversity of viewpoints that enabled him to create some of his most dramatic and unexpected pictorial compositions. In all of them, the viewer is positioned in ways that give a heightened sense of the immediacy of the seene. In The Rocks at Pourville, Low Tide, Monet placed himself far out across the beach, a little to the east of Pourville. He justaposed the cliffs in the far distance with the fragmented forms of the rock shelves in the foreground.

Monet's technique gradually changed from completing paintings out of doors to one of making hundreds of concentrated studies on location. He then compiled and reworked these many sketches in his studio, where he created the final canvases.