More about Cliff Walk at Pourville

Wyatt Billingsley

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The Cliff Walk is one of a series of works that Monet painted when he was just trying to get away from it all.

It was not looking like the 1880s were going to treat the artist well. His wife had died right before the beginning of the decade, and, at the same time, France was in the midst of an extended depression that was affecting Monet’s sales. In fact, most of Europe was out of sorts trying to navigate what would later come to be called the Long Depression. As a result, Monet booked a trip to Normandy to enjoy the scenic beaches. Apparently they were so scenic that he would decide to spend the last 30 years of his life on the coast.

Considering how poorly things were going for him, one would think that the artist would want to paint something other than reality. However, Monet is the Impressionist of Impressionists, and capturing the here-and-now is exactly what Impressionism is all about. The style avoided the more dramatic elements associated with Romanticism and the historical bent of Neoclassicism, instead favoring images of every day life for the leisure class. In fact, the movement was so committed to capturing the real world that a good majority of the works were done plein air, or outdoors.

It's interesting to consider the correlation between national economic hardship and styles of art that depict the world "as is." In the same way that the Long Depression was the setting that produced Impressionism, forty years later, during the Great Depression, the art world would once again drift towards realism. After a period where Expressionism was riding high with paintings like The Scream, and the works of Pablo Piccaso, we see a pivot in American art to images of the mundane and average, like American Gothic and Gas. 

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Here is what Wikipedia says about The Cliff Walk at Pourville

The Cliff Walk at Pourville is an 1882 painting by the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet. It currently resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is a landscape painting featuring two girls atop a cliff above the sea.

The canvas was inspired by an extended stay at Pourville in 1882. Monet settled in the village between February and mid-April, during which time he wrote to his future wife, Alice Hoschedé, "How beautiful the countryside is becoming, and what joy it would be for me to show you all its delightful nooks and crannies!" They returned in June of that year. The two young girls standing atop the cliff may be Hoschedé's daughters, Marthe and Blanche; it has also been suggested that the figures represent Alice and Blanche, both of whom painted out of doors at that time.

The various elements of the painting are unified through brushwork; short, crisp strokes were used to paint the grasses of the cliff, the girls' drapery and the distant sea. A sense of movement suggested by painterly calligraphy was a property of Monet's work in the 1880s, and is here used to connote the effect of a summer wind upon figures, land, water, and clouds moving across the sky. During the painting process, Monet reduced the size of a rocky promontory at far right, to better balance the composition's proportions; however, it's also been noted that this secondary cliff was a late addition to the canvas, and was not part of the original design. An X-ray of the painting indicates that the artist originally painted a third figure into the grouping, then removed it.

Describing similar works by the artist, art historian John House wrote, “His cliff tops rarely show a single sweep of terrain. Instead there are breaks in space; the eye progresses into depth by a succession of jumps; distance is expressed by planes overlapping each other and by atmospheric rather than linear perspective- by softening the focus and changes of color.” The sense of immediacy is heightened by the juxtapositions of the cliff and sea, the contrast between ground and openness.

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