Throughout Monet’s artistic career, he repeatedly explored and documented the changing atmospheric effects of light and nature. He had long been fascinated by the distinctly different character light is able to create at different times of day, however, it was not until 1891 that his practice of painting en plein air and subsequent reworking in the studio became more formalised. For the first time, Monet chose a single motif which he systematically repeated at different times of day, in changing light, varying weather conditions and changing seasons. This new methodical approach resulted in his first 'series' paintings of grainstacks, with each canvas a variation of the same motif, expressing his wish to constitute a particular effect. In May 1891, all fifteen paintings were exhibited in one room at the gallery of his Paris-based dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Upon seeing the group of works, the French art critic and historian Gustave Geffroy described them as ‘transitory objects on which are reflected, as on a mirror, the influences of the environment [and] atmospheric conditions’ (Gustave Geffroy, ‘Claude Monet Exhibitions’, in Charles Stuckey, Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 163). The chosen subject matter becomes increasingly unimportant, instead, form becomes an independent vehicle for colour, light and ambience.

Monet’s ambition to capture the transitory nature of his subject is acutely felt in Sur la falaise près de Dieppe, soleil couchant. The painter’s development toward a more poetic, even abstract quality, and away from the pronounced naturalism of his earlier works becomes ever more evident in the present canvas. Monet returned to the Normandy coast in February 1896 - a landscape he knew well from his first stay there in the 1880s - and began to depict the coastline surrounding Dieppe (fig. 1). These views of Pourville, Val-Saint-Nicolas and Varengeville, constitute three series that Monet combined under the title Falaises when he exhibited twenty-four of the works at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1898, including the present work. Monet implemented the lessons he had learnt from his recently completed series of grainstacks and Rouen Cathedral, and captured the ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere in transforming a landscape. As Paul Hayes Tucker notes regarding the Faiaises: ‘They are also some of the most unusual and the most personal. At once hedonistic and introspective, they assert fundamental values that Monet held dear while they challenge notions that contemporary critics had claimed were central to his enterprise and to landscape painting at the end of the century.’ (P. H. Tucker in Monet in the ‘90s. The Series Paintings (exhibition catalogue), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1990, p. 191)

The weather in Normandy was famously volatile; one day the sky was filled with light, the next was overcast, causing Monet to begin one canvas after another and grow increasingly frustrated. However, the rapidly changing weather would become precisely what Monet would capture so effectively in his series of almost fifty paintings of the Normandy coast. Expansive and windswept, many of the coastal scenes were filled with strong and high-keyed colours applied with broad brushstrokes, perfectly capturing the iridescence and sunlight cutting through the mist (figs. 2 & 3). These works were created at a crucial turning point in Monet’s career; he turned to his series of Matinées sur la Seine as soon as he returned to Paris, where he adapted the lessons learnt from painting the highly atmospheric northern coast and transposed them into his translucent depictions of water.

The views of Normandy offered a perfect counterfoil to the artist’s contemporaneous Matinée sur la Seine series when they were exhibited together at the Galerie Georges Petit in June 1898. Whereas the paintings of the Seine were imbued with the hushed silence of early morning and employed a more restrained palette, the Normandy views were tumultuous, filled with intense colours and vigorous brushwork. Less concerned with the precariousness or changing nature of the scenery before him, in these compositions Monet instead focused on the eternal romance and drama of the Normandy coast, imbuing his canvases with an air of the sublime.

Another striking element of Sur la falaise près de Dieppe, soleil couchant are the loose and dab-like brushstrokes that the artist employs to create the sense of capturing a fleeting moment, almost like a photograph. With Monet’s increased focus on the evocation of momentary effects, he saw the paradox between realising a convincing execution of a fleeting impression and the not-so-fleeting process required to create the desired effect. After careful and time-intensive studying en plein air, the artist returned to his studio for deliberate revisions. The incomparable soft and luminous effect of light and colour can be immediately felt in the present work. As Paul Hayes Tucker comments: 'What is striking about these pictures is their rather extra-ordinary palette of pinks, soft oranges, sea greens, pale violets, and light blues - pastel shades that he had not employed as consistently as in earlier work. The same fanciful, almost unreal colour is evident [...] in all of the other paintings that Monet began during this Normandy campaign in 1896' (ibid., p. 212).

One of the keys to Monet’s later works lies in the paradox between his desire to capture a precise moment in time, yet simultaneously create a highly subjective rendering of his chosen subject matter. The present work perfectly encapsulates Monet’s approach to resolving this: seeking a way of translating nature’s most fleeting effects into fully realised works of art.