The Departure of the Boats, Étretat

Claude Monet · 1885

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

73.5 × 93.5 cm (28 15/16 × 36 13/16 in.); Framed: 102.3 × 121.7 × 10.8 cm (40 1/4 × 47 7/8 × 4 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

The Departure of the Boats, Étretat places you on a grey-green Norman shore at the moment the fishing fleet pushes out to sea, the water churned and restless beneath a sky that seems to shift as you look at it. Monet returned to Étretat repeatedly throughout the 1880s, drawn by the drama of its chalk cliffs and the rhythms of its working harbour. By 1885 he had fully committed to painting in series — returning to the same motif across different hours and weathers — and this canvas reflects that discipline: every brushstroke is in service of atmosphere rather than detail, the boats rendered with a few decisive marks that somehow feel entirely real. His technique here leans on broken colour and visible brushwork to convey the weight of wet air and the movement of water, qualities that elude photography entirely. Monet sent several of his Étretat paintings to the 1886 fifth Impressionist exhibition, where the coastal series drew particular attention for its raw, almost unfinished energy — a quality that now reads as one of its greatest strengths. Our hand-painted oil reproduction uses the same materials and layering process as the original, preserving the textural life of Monet's surface in a way that a print simply cannot replicate.