Claude Monet’s Tempête à Belle- Île is an immediate, powerful canvas painted in the fall of 1886 when the artist took on the dramatic Brittany coastline found on the island of Belle Île. The shore of Brittany, battered by the Atlantic Ocean, was a far cry from either the relative peace of the Mediterranean or that of the Channel near Le Havre and Étretat, the other primary locations of Monet’s marine focus. “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, vo. 97, no. 3, September 2015, pp. 323-24).
Indeed it was Mirbeau, the first owner of Tempête à Belle-Île, 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, stretched on for nearly three months and resulted in some forty canvases. It is quite likely that Mirbeau acquired Tempête à Belle-Ile from Monet on the latter’s visit to Noirmoutiers in November of 1886. The immediacy of the present work would have been appealing to Mirbeau, who loved the ragged seascape of Brittany. “Storm on Belle-Isle is a rapidly worked canvas,” writes John House of the present work, “with no sign of afterthoughts and later repainting. Only when storms swept over the island in October 1886 did Monet see its full pictorial potential, and seek motifs which expressed the full force of the ocean against its rocks… [The painting] clearly satisfied Monet at once, since he signed and dated it when its paint was still wet… Its handling, which suggests the surf of the sea by sweeping calligraphic brushwork, makes it one of the boldest and most successful sketches which Monet ever made of natural forces at their most extreme” (Exh. Cat., London, The Royal Academy of Arts and Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Post-Impressionism: Cross-Currents in European Painting 1890-1906, 1979-80, pp. 98-99).
The Rocks of Port-Goulphar from the Curates’ Beach
Out of the group of forty oils that Monet created during his Belle Île residency, the present work and four other paintings (W. 1115-1119) take on the same vantage point looking towards the rocks of Port-Goulphar from the Curates’ beach (see index above and fig. 1 below). These five canvases were created in mid-October of 1886; two of them Tempête, côte de Belle- Île (W. 1116) and Mer démontée (W. 1118) are held in museum collects ions—the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, Algiers respectively. Indeed, almost half of Monet’s paintings created in Belle Île are now found in museum collects ions.
Monet is the best known proponent of the Impressionists' revolutionary practice of painting en plein aire. While he did his work in the field, carting canvases, easels, paints, brushes and other paraphernalia throughout France, and at t.mes s even further afield, his works were often refined in a studio setting after the initial “impression” on the canvas was completed. This was especially true later in life when he built large studio structures to accommodate his-ever larger iterations of his Nymphéas. In the present work, however, his composition and his handling of the paint is immediate. The rush of surf, curling of waves and almost obliteration of the view of the horizon speak to the tempestuous weather he captures here so eloquently. It was this kind of instant translated into Monet’s own visual reality that makes the artist the natural progenitor to both the abstraction of the early twentieth-century in its first proponents such as Kandinsky (whose bafflement on viewing one of Monet’s Meules led him to approach painting in an entirely different way thereafter) to the Abstract Expressionists and beyond as with artists such as Cy Twombly, whose focus on gesture is echoed in the crests and curls of the waves in the present work (see fig. 2).
Tempête à Belle-Île may well have been included in Monet’s groundbreaking show at the Galerie Georges Petit, which hung his works alongside the sculptures of Auguste Rodin. Opening in late June that show hung until August; a dozen of Monet’s works showing the landscapes of Belle-Île were included. For his part Rodin included his recently completed monument to the Burghers of Calais alongside thirty-five other sculptures. Octave Mirbeau was close to both artists and reviewed the exhibition very favorably. Tempête à Belle-Île remained with Mirbeau for his lifet.mes and his widow kept the painting until the end of her life as well, an honor that was not afforded to everything in Mirbeau’s collects ion, much of which was sold at an auction held by Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1919. Included in a number of important exhibitions, the present work has remained in the same private collects ion for over twenty years.
