The Cliff at Étretat

This view of the chalk cliffs at Étretat, with their natural arch and needle-like rock, repeats the motif that made the Normandy coast famous in nineteenth-century landscape painting. Long attributed to Gustave Courbet, whose striking treatments of the site did much to fix it in the popular imagination, the canvas is now recognized by the Cleveland Museum of Art as the work of an imitator, painted after 1872 and close in date to Courbet’s own depictions of the Alabaster Coast. The painting is held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1929.465), gift of the Estate of Charles F. Brush.