1897
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Dominant colour
The Customs House at Varengeville is a 1897 oil by Claude Monet, a Impressionism work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
The painting shows a small customs house on a cliffside. It's one of many paintings Monet made of this scene. He liked to paint the same thing multiple times to see how light changed it. He tried new things with paint to show atmosphere, like using more white to make it feel airy. Check out the work of Claude Monet.
Claude Monet painted the customs house at Varengeville, on the Normandy coast of France, four times in 1882 and four more times in 1897. On each occasion he chose a similar vantage looking down on the small structure, which appears to grow out of the cliffside. The dimensions of this version are nearly identical to those of the other three canvases from the second visit. Here, Monet increased the amount of white in his paints to capture more nuanced atmospheric effects. He also experimented with techniques to animate the surface, at times scraping down or wiping away the still-soft paint to…
The artist (d. 1926); sold to Galerie Allard et Noel, Feb. 1899, for 6,000 francs [per Monet’s livre de comptes, ventes janvier–juillet 1899, photocopy of this page in curatorial object file]. Maurice Masson, Paris, by Feb. 27, 1911 [per Bernheim-Jeune, exh. cat., 1911]; sold at the Maurice Masson, Paris, sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 22, 1911, lot 23, to Durand-Ruel, Paris, for 9,020 francs [per Hôtel Drouot, sale cat., June 22, 1911; see also Durand-Ruel, Paris, stock book for 1901–13 (no. 9648, as La cabane du douanier), as confirmed by Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel,…
Possibly Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Exposition Claude Monet, June 1898, cat. 27 or 28, as Poste de Douaniers, à Varengeville, 1897. Possibly Paris, Bernheim-Jeune, Exposition Monet, 1906. Paris, Bernheim-Jeune, Collection Maurice Masson, Feb. 27–Mar. 15, 1911, cat. 23, as La cabane du douanier. Chicago, Stratford Hotel, Tableaux Durand-Ruel, late Jan.–early Feb. 1914. Art Institute of Chicago, “A Century of Progress”: Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture; Lent from American Collections, May 23–Nov. 1, 1933, cat. 296. Art Institute of Chicago, “A Century of Progress”: Loan Exhibition…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Oscar-Claude Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840, and raised from the age of five in Le Havre, where he began selling charcoal caricatures as a teenager.
See the richer artist page
