The Beach at Trouville - Claude Monet Poster

The Beach at Trouville - Once he had set up on the beach at Trouville - the Mecca of high society in summer - Claude Monet was able to depict in full the frivolous nature of the world around him by creating a number of views of it. By executing views of the whole beach he could concentrate on the place where fashionable people paraded up and down. Occasionally the artist also did far more detailed views, often centred on female figures in close-up, which produced more original perspectives. For this painting, however, Monet positioned himself at right angles to the beach and laid out his canvas by juxtaposing the different spaces: the sea, the beach, the wooden walkway and stairs accessing the terrace, and finally the seafront's grand facades lined up in a row. Claude Monet (1840 – 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).