The Cliff at Étretat

Courbet painted this striking view of the Normandy coast’s chalk cliffs, part of a series of plein-air studies he produced along the Alabaster Coast in the 1860s and 1870s. The towering formation at Étretat, with its natural arch and needle-like rock, became one of the most iconic motifs of nineteenth-century landscape painting.
The painting is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art (accession 1929.465), gift of the Estate of Charles F. Brush.