Claude Monet’s Port-Coton, Le Lion is an immediate, powerful canvas painted in the fall of 1886 when the artist took on the dramatic coastline of the island of Belle Île. The shore of Brittany, battered by the Atlantic Ocean, was a very different environment to that of the Mediterranean or the Channel near Le Havre and Étretat, the other primary locations of Monet’s marine paintings. “This will be a new phase of his talent,” wrote Octave Mirbeau, “A terrible and formidable Monet, unfamiliar to us until now” (reproduced in Nita Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “’Le Grand Tout’: Monet on Belle- Île and the Impulse toward Unity,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 97, no. 3, September 2015, pp. 323-24).
"I am in a wonderfully wild region, with terrifying rocks and a sea of unbelievable colours; I am truly thrilled, even though it is difficult, because I had got used to painting the Channel, and I knew how to go about it, but the Atlantic Ocean is quite different"
Indeed it was Mirbeau who suggested to Monet that he should visit this wild and ravaged coast. What was to be a two-week detour to Belle Île, prior to visiting Mirbeau in his home on the nearby island of Noirmoutiers, extended to nearly three months and resulted in some forty canvases. “In the paintings,” writes Nina Athanasolgou-Kallmyer, “the extraordinary shapes of the rocks rise from the light-speckled surface of the sea…. Some are views of Port Coton’s tall pointed rock; some feature rocks in animal forms, such as one resembling a lion; and others show the rounded, interlocked boulders of Port Goulphar and Port Domois [see fig. 1]…. Monet’s thickly pigmented brush constructs rough textures by means of short superimposed touches, suggesting the coarse materiality of wet surfaces encrusted with shells, lichens, and harsh sea growth” (ibid., p. 323).
Right: Fig. 3 Claude Monet, Rochers Ă Porte-Coton, le Lion, 1886, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Of the forty oils that Monet created during his t.mes in Belle Île, the present work and two other paintings (W. 1090 and 1091) take on the same vantage point viewing the Rocher du Lion. The so-called “Lion’s Rock” at Port-Coton lies immediately adjacent to the “Pyramids” or “Needles” on this rugged coast. The varied rock formations which thrust out of the surf presented an ideal subject for Monet during his stay. “All alone, standing on its forelegs,” wrote Gustave Geffroy, “head bent towards the ground, the hindquarters just emerging from the waters, stands this granite lion, a huge greenish lion sculpted by t.mes , covered with the patina of the sea, enduring the assault of the waves and dripping under the spray of the breakers” (quoted in Daniel Wildenstein, Monet: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Cologne, 1996, p. 413). The three canvases that make up this small suite were all created in the fall of 1886; two of them, Côte rocheuse, rocher du Lion, Bell-Île (W. 1090) and Rochers à Porte-Coton, le Lion are held in the collects ion of the Des Moines Art Center and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (W. 1091) respectively (see figs. X and X). Almost half of Monet’s Belle Île paintings are now in museum collects ions and the present work is the only canvas of this specific view that remains in private hands.
Port-Coton, Le Lion was first held in the collects ion of Olivier Sainsère, a French statesman and art collects or. Sainsère was an important patron of the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His wide-ranging collects ion included works by Claude Monet, Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin to Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Sainsère supported many modern avant-garde painters in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century and discovered Picasso at the Galerie Berthe Weill, becoming one of his earliest collects ors in 1901 and even assisting him with his French residency permit. Many works owned by Sainsère now enrich the collects ions of some of the world’s greatest museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay (see fig. 4).
