It was fairly common at this time to conflate Japanese and Chinese sources, and, in a letter to fellow painter Jean-Frédéric Bazille of December 1868–January 1869, Monet requested that Bazille send him several of his own canvases, including "le tableau chinois où il ya des drapeaux" (the Chinese painting with flags), referring to this painting (Wildenstein 1974, vol. Specifically regarding his use of color, critic Théodore Duret wrote in 1880, "Among our landscape painters Claude Monet was the first to have the boldness to go as far as the Japanese in the use of color" (Duret 1880). (The painter appears to have placed his easel next to a second-floor window of a villa to achieve this vantage point.) Later, Monet recalled to an art dealer, "at the time this composition was considered daring" (Gimpel 1966). His use of an elevated bird’s eye view was also a product of looking at the prints of Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. Monet’s source for these kinds of colors was Japanese ukiyo-e prints. ) What was new was the integration of eye-popping colors into and a flatter representation of the three structuring bands. (For example, see Boudin’s On the Beach, Dieppe of 1864 and Princess Pauline Metternich (1836–1921) on the Beach of 1865–67. Monet’s informal teacher Eugène Boudin, whom Monet had met in 1856–57 and from whom he learned to paint out-of-doors, had been painting images of the seaside with a tripartite structure for a few years already. This manner of creating a seaside composition dominated by three-tiered horizontal planes was not new. The picture is organized in three color bands dominated by the light blue sky, darker blue sea, and greens of the foreground, which are complemented by the inclusion of the tricolore. Still, Monet’s father sits erectly in his seat, alert to any hint he may glean of the nature of the interaction at center. The long shadows cast by the sun just beyond the picture frame to the left of the scene betray that the hour presented is a late afternoon languorous one. The clear sky gets cloudier as it reaches both the horizon line and the ships’ smoke. Even in this relatively early work, the painter naturalistically presents smokestacks (the mucky element of then-modern global trade’s steamships), just as he would later show factory smokestacks beyond scenes of bourgeois leisure at Argenteuil in the 1870s. Farther out at sea lie larger ships, including steamers that paint the sky with grey smoke. Two people sit on a sailboat with three sails near the younger couple, and more boats with sails down are moored at left. The French tricolore (the tri-colored red, white, and blue flag of France) flies high at right, while at left is a red and yellow flag, either a local sailing club’s colors or, possibly, the Spanish flag’s colors to honor Maria Cristina de Borbón, the widow of Ferdinand VII of Spain who lived then in a nearby villa (Salinger 1970). ![]() Gladiolas, geraniums, and nasturtiums naturally occurring in varying reds unite here in one bright red tone. ![]() This foursome is surrounded by greenery punctuated throughout by flowers in red and yellow hues and whites that echo the white dresses. Adolphe-Aimé Lecadre, or another male relative (Baillio 2010, p. She has been identified as Sophie’s daughter, Jeanne-Marguerite, and he is generally thought to be Sophie’s husband, Dr. The pair look out to the younger couple at the edge of the water, she in another highly fashionable white dress with red trimming and parasol and he more formally dressed than Monet’s father, in a top hat and black jacket. She is often said to represent Sophie Lecadre, the wife of Adolphe-Aimé Lecadre, one of three nephews of Monet’s aunt Marie-Jeanne Lecadre and her then deceased husband, Jacques (Baillio 2010, p. A gray-bearded gentleman modeled by Monet’s own father, Adolphe, sits mostly with his back to us in a Panama hat accompanied by a fashionable woman in a black-accented white dress and parasol, also seated in one of the bentwood caned chairs in the foreground. In fact, this paean to sunlit days at the Normandy shore replete with sailboats, parasols, and flags flying strongly in the breeze tells more about the highly-ordered holiday time of the French bourgeoisie in the 1860s. It was a moment of great uncertainty in the painter’s life, yet we gain very little sense of that from this picture. The Painting: In the summer of 1867, Monet was spending time with his family at Sainte-Adresse, a seaside resort just north of Le Havre.
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