The Beach at Sainte-Adresse

Monet painted this during the summer of 1867, when he was 26 and staying with his aunt Sophie Lecadre in Sainte-Adresse, an affluent resort village near Le Havre where he had grown up. He was under considerable financial pressure at the time, supporting his companion Camille Doncieux and their newborn son on an allowance from his father. Despite finishing the painting that summer, Monet chose not to exhibit it for nearly nine years — it appeared first at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876. The work passed through the collection of the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, one of the most important early buyers of Impressionist painting, before reaching the dealer Durand-Ruel, who sold it to Annie Swan Coburn of Chicago in 1923. Coburn bequeathed it to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1933 as part of the Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.