Garden at Sainte-Adresse

1867

Oil on canvas, 98.1 × 129.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A terrace above the Channel in strong sunlight, painted when Monet was 26. It is one of the boldest pictures he made before Impressionism had a name.

Painted in summer 1867 at Sainte-Adresse, a resort by Le Havre, where Monet's family stayed.
The seated man in the Panama hat is the artist's father, Adolphe.
The high viewpoint and flat bands of bright color come from Japanese woodblock prints, a source the Impressionists kept returning to.
Look at the two flags, pulled hard by the same sea wind.
It hung in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879; the Met bought it in 1967.

By the 1860s, rail lines had made the Normandy coast a holiday ground for city families. The picture records that new middle-class leisure.