Monet's Places

In 1870, Claude Monet had escaped from the ravages of the Franco-Prussian war into exile in London. On his way back to Paris, the artist spent time in the city of Zaandam in Holland. From May to October 1871, Monet painted a dozen views showing the port and the houses along the dike at various times of the day.

The port basin from Monet’s time now no longer exists; today, we find ourselves in front of an Asian restaurant.

Severely damaged during World War II, the city in northwestern France was reconstructed from 1945 to 1954 under the direction of architect Auguste Perret. Since 2005, Le Havre has been a UNESCO World Heritage site.    

After his move in 1878 to Vétheuil, a small village on the Seine about 65 kilometers north of Paris, Claude Monet's creative activity focused on the lush landscape of fields and meadows. Often he evoked human activity only indirectly, through motifs such as paths or vaguely recognizable buildings in the distance.

Here, for example, the church tower of Vétheuil appears in glowing white behind the tree line, just as the photographer Christoph Irrgang also discovered it between the trees.

The unstaged quality of the composition lends this painting of Monet’s garden in the Seine village of Vétheuil the character of a modern, spontaneous snapshot.

Today, the stairway is no longer found in the same location, and the area of the garden is now occupied by an annex, which Christoph Irrgang photographed from the garden of a neighboring private house.

The 1880s witnessed the height of Monet’s keen enthusiasm for traveling. Of all the places Monet visited during this period, none fascinated him more than France’s northern coasts evidenced by a string of work trips to Normandy towns and villages such as former fishing village of Pourville-sur-Mer.

In Pourville-sur-Mer, Monet repeatedly painted the motif of the cliffs, at times augmenting them with an isolated figure, house, or boat. Today, the landscape below the cliff is occupied by buildings.

Here, Claude Monet chose a vantage point that emphasized the cliffs' monumentality. Strong color contrasts intensify the drama of the scene, in which Monet suggested the figures of beachgoers using only a few daubs of the brush.

Even today, the small seaside resort of Les Petites-Dalles near Fécamp in Normandy is famous for its glowing white cliffs.

In 1884 Monet spent a number of weeks in Bordighera, a city on the coast of Italy about ten kilometers from the French border.

Monet described Bordighera and its environs as "magical" and overpowering, and at first found it difficult to adequately render the intense colors of the region.

Claude Monet made multiple visits to the seaside resort of Étretat in Normandy, famous for its spectacular cliffs. For this painting, he waited for the precise moment when the sun would shine through the opening in the striking stone arch of Porte d’Aval.

The striking rock formation was not only a frequent motif of impressionist painters, but is also popular in contemporary prints and photographs.

Claude Monet depicted the old city of Antibes—which at that time was already an aspiring tourist destination on the French Riviera—against the silhouette of the snow-covered Alps.

Christoph Irrgang, too, photographed the old city from the beach; today, the bay encompasses a large port and a yacht marina.

In the autumn of 1908, Monet and his wife Alice spent a number of weeks in Venice, a city that perhaps more than any other had enchanted generations of painters before him.

For his views of the canal Rio della Salute, Monet had a gondolier row him to the same place on the water multiple times; photographer Christoph Irrgang, too, made his images from a water taxi.

The Palazzo Contarini is located on the south side of the Grand Canal in Venice. Monet painted his views of this palace from the Palazzo Barbaro, the residence of the American patroness Mary Young Hunter, with whom he and his wife Alice stayed during the first two weeks of their sojourn in Venice.

Today, the Palazzo Contarini houses the offices and Rosand Library & Study Center of the American non-profit Save Venice, an organization devoted to the study and restoration of the art and cultural heritage of Venice.