Cliffs and Sea, Sainte-Adresse

Drawn on the Normandy coast about 1864, before Impressionism had a name, this black-chalk study already carries the young Monet’s lifelong subject: the meeting of cliff, sea and sky at Sainte-Adresse, where his family summered. The quick hatching that shades the chalk face and the buoyant patches marking the swell are the same shorthand he would later translate into the broken touches of his painting, and the pin of a sailing boat beyond the headland anticipates a motif he returned to across four decades. It is a compact work on paper, but it is Monet thinking in light before he had fully discovered color. The drawing is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.