Boats on the Beach at Étretat

Boats on the Beach at Étretat — Claude Monet. 1885.

Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 66 × 82.3 cm (26 × 32 7/16 in.); Framed: 85.1 × 100.4 × 9.6 cm (33 1/2 × 39 1/2 × 3 3/4 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

Forced indoors by inclement fall weather, Claude Monet painted Boats on the Beach at Étretat and The Departure of the Boats, Étretat while looking out the window of his room at the Hôtel Blanquet. The two form a pair that share a palette, subject, and vantage point. In one of his daily letters to his companion and future wife, Alice Hoschedé, dated November 24, 1885, Monet he described first Boats on the Beach and then Departure of the Boats : “In the afternoon, I worked in my room on my caloges [retired fishing boats covered with tarred planks and used for storage] in the rain, then I attempted to do, always through the window, a picture of the boats departing.” Monet centered each composition on the boats, combining pastel blues, pinks, purples, and greens to render wet surfaces. The brightly colored hulls of beached crafts lend relative scale to the structures in Boats on the Beach , and the groups of figures at the water’s edge, composed of quick, gestural strokes, register human activity in Departure of the Boats .

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.