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Claude Monet - The Seine Estuary at Honfluer 1865

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From Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena:
In 1865, a twenty-four-year-old Claude Monet made his Salon debut with this picture and its pendant (today in the Kimbell Art Museum), declaring an allegiance to Courbet, Manet, and the Realist avant-garde. We stand on a jetty looking across the harbor at Honfleur, a town on the Normandy Coast where the Seine empties into the English Channel. The sails of fishing boats swell with a wind that stiffens waves in the foreground and sends clouds rolling across the sky. For all its salty immediacy, the picture was painted not outdoors—en plein air—but back in Monet’s Paris studio, on the basis of sketches he had made on-site.