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Claude Monet - Fishing Boats at Sea 1868

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From Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington:
During the 1860s, a young Monet still in his twenties began developing a style that would eclipse that of his early mentors and painting companions. Although Fishing Boats at Sea was finished in the studio, it has the freshness of the plein-air style Monet practiced with Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind. It also employs a kind of coarse realism, as developed by his friend, Gustave Courbet. It is the broad brushwork, the unconventional flattened picture plane, and the harsh contrast of dark and light, (all techniques paralleling the work of the older Édouard Manet,) that made this work unacceptable for exhibit at the official 1869 Paris Salon. Undeterred by the rejection of academics, Monet continued to develop his unique style, and, during the next decade, moved away from seascapes and other traditional subject matter toward explorations of the impact of transitory light, weather, and atmosphere on a subject.