Artist: Claude Monet

Created: 1872

Dimensions (cm): 48 × 63

Format: Oil on canvas

Location: Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

This work was painted from a hotel window at Le Havre in 1873 and it was one of the nine works that Monet showed at the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874.

Despite its notoriety, the painting is in some ways untypical of Monet’s own work of this period and of Impressionism more generally, as it shows little of the Impressionist treatment of light and color: colors are very restrained and the paint is applied in very thin washes, restricting details to a bare minimum.

Also, the technique is very ‘sketchy’ and would have been seen as a preliminary study for a painting, which is why Monet himself adopted the title ‘Impression’ to distinguish it from his “finishes” works.